At the end of each year, we at UCLA Today look forward to recognizing the contributions of some exceptional employees who give generously of their talents, energy and time to make a difference in someone else’s life. While the paths they choose are different — from giving parentless children a home to helping teenagers hardened by an environment of poverty and crime — these individuals share passion and commitment to causes they find meaningful and essential. We commend them.

ANTOINETTE REYNOLDS

Talk with Antoinette Reynolds, administrative specialist in the Arthur Ashe Student Health and Wellness Center, and you immediately sense she seizes life’s challenges with great passion. That’s especially evident during the holiday season when she takes part in Angel Tree, a project to provide gifts for children on behalf of their parents in prison.

“Being a link between parent and child is such a blessing,” said Reynolds, a single mother of a 15-year-old son and a volunteer for the past 13 years. “When these children receive a present from a parent who is in jail, it opens a door and fills a missing space. We’re then able to interact with these children on so many levels.”

Reynolds began volunteering for this nationwide prison fellowship program with her mother. When her mother died eight years ago, Reynolds stayed on, enlisting the help of friends as well as campus colleagues. She also recruited 14 congregants from her Gardena-based church, Liberty Tabernacle Ministry, which adopted the program two years ago.

On Dec. 13, some 200 children will come to her church for a holiday celebration. With gifts provided by individuals and corporate sponsors, Angel Tree volunteers will bring holiday cheer, along with food, clothing and other basic necessities, to, all told, some 31,000 Los Angeles County children with parents in California prisons. “It’s awesome,” Reynolds said.

Giving and caring come naturally to Reynolds, whose family, especially her mother and grandmother, were always hosts and caretakers. In honor of that tradition, she plans to create the Mildred Cursh Foundation, named after her mother, to extend Angel Tree’s outreach to many other churches and to provide math and computer-skills tutoring to the children of prisoners.

“I always see the vision and the possibilities for what needs to get done, and I find a way to make it happen,” she said.

— Michael Stone

GLENN TOTH
In a job that can fluctuate between long stretches of routine and dizzying episodes of excitement, the event that Glenn Toth described as his most satisfying experience was seemingly unremarkable.

Responding to a report of a missing child, Toth, a reserve deputy with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, and his partner were preparing for what’s known as a Phase II search — one that involves spreading out over a wide area, looking in houses, alleys, drainage ditches — when they had a flash. While other deputies were rounding up pictures of the missing child to use in the search, Toth and his partner (“He really gets most of the credit for this,” Toth said) decided to take a chance and check out a McDonald’s several blocks away that had a play area.

And sure enough, “there he was,” Toth said. “Just by thinking a little out of the box we found the kid, and he was fine and it had a very happy ending.”

In his “day job” as an administrator with UCLA Athletics, Toth is an associate athletic director, responsible for the department’s corporate-relations program. He deals with some 70-75 corporate sponsors of UCLA Athletics, as well as supervises men’s and women’s golf and tennis. He also oversees the video department and the weight, equipment and training rooms. He has worked there for 26 years, beginning soon after he graduated in 1976.

Toth became a scuba instructor at UCLA in 1984 and joined the Sheriff’s Search and Recovery dive team as a reserve deputy. In 1990 he “got the bug for patrol work.”

While he still dives, today he spends most of his volunteer shifts working out of the department’s Lennox Station in southeast L.A. County.

“Law enforcement work is so diverse,” Toth said. “One time you may be dealing with a violent crime that requires quick thinking, or with something that is tragic like recovering the body of a drowning victim, and other times things happen that are humorous beyond measure.”

His reason for doing it?

“I believe that the ‘haves’ must give something back, and my way is through the Sheriff’s Department,” he said. “I am truly blessed. I get to work with probably the two best groups of people on earth, cops and coaches.”

— David Greenwald

ROSEMARY SHULMAN
Rosemary Shulman said that it was a “totally selfish motivation” that made her want to become a mom. But how selfish is a single woman who has opened her home to four newborns within the last three years, one of whom she adopted?

An administrative specialist in the Department of Radiological Sciences, Shulman decided four years ago to spend part of her summer vacation at a camp for special-needs children in Palmer, Alaska. She served as a camp counselor to children with Down syndrome, cerebral palsy, fetal alcohol syndrome, “the gamut,” she said. “We were determined to give them the best week of their lives, so we took them horseback riding and white-water rafting. We got kids and their wheelchairs into the rafts. It was pretty wild, and it was great.”

When she got home, Shulman realized it was time to do something about being a parent. Her initial efforts to go through the Los Angeles County adoption system led to frustration as she waited weeks to attend the required parenting classes. At the suggestion of a colleague, Shulman contacted a foster/adoption agency, and within two weeks she was enrolled in a class. She was certified as a foster parent in March 1999, and received her first placement of a child, a little girl, shortly afterward.

Since then, Shulman has cared for three other newborns, including her son, Matthew, whom she adopted in June 2001. She helped create a newsletter for adoptive families, and an article she wrote urging others to consider adoption through foster care is in the current issue of Adoptive Families Magazine.

“It’s embarrassing that you’re writing about me,” said Shulman, who’s thinking about adopting another child. “But if this story gets five UCLA employees to consider adopting, then I’ll be a happy camper.”

— Wendy Soderburg

PAM CYSNER
Anger is a natural emotion. What’s important, Pam Cysner explained, is how one chooses to express it.

This is the message Cysner seeks to convey to teens in Inglewood, where poverty, gangs and other dismal conditions lead all too commonly to violence.

Cysner, who works in UCLA’s Center for Student Programming as an adviser to student groups, has spent most of her life volunteering for youth. For 20 years she has worked with athletes, families and coaches in the Westside Special Olympics. She has led numerous workshops on diversity and conflict resolution for UCLA student leaders.

For the past eight years, she has served in five Inglewood schools in a program called Alternatives to Violence, teaching communication techniques, anger management and conflict mediation to middle and high school students — and in some cases, their teachers.

“Mostly I listen,” said Cysner, a trained mediator who tries her best to see things from the perspective of those she works with. Only then, she said, “can I help them find ways to communicate in a different way than slugging somebody.”

Many of the students have been abused, neglected and demoralized. Many have a long history of getting into trouble at school. “I get kids telling me, ‘I feel that nobody cares,’ ” she recounted. “If it happens at home, and they go to school and feel nobody’s listening there, too, they get angry.”

Cysner strives to teach students to channel their emotions into leadership skills. She has her success stories, among them, former gang leaders who return to talk to students now in her workshops.

It’s an uphill climb, she admitted. “It’s hard — I have to be honest. And yet, at the same time, I know that it’s not going to change unless I try.”

— Judy Lin-Eftekhar