JANNYDA SRE FIRST participated in the Boys and Girls Club of Pomona Valley the summer before her freshman year of high school and has been intimately involved ever since. She attributes the life affirming lessons and incalculable benefits of the organization to her bright future ahead as she proudly soldiers through her freshman year at UCLA.

RUBY ANTOSH COMES FROM a troubled past, to be sure, but her future is brighter than ever, thanks to the Boys and Girls Club of the West Valley, and support from local attorneys through the Valley Community Legal Foundation (VCLF) of the San Fernando Valley Bar Association.

AS A CHILD, MARGO AKOPOV admits that her father’s world of addiction and abuse were something she was blind to “for only in my lacerated memories do I recall the welded stench of toxic, sweat, and liquor that had stalked my father into oblivion,” she says. “Guided by the countless number of cigarettes that fed his ravenous cancer, my father had ignited his own death.”