Last month, during those heavy windstorms, Canyon Country resident Rlynn Smith-Thomas said she had more power outages at her home than power.
It was late in the afternoon on a Sunday, and the sun was setting. If she was going to accomplish everything she needed to get done before going back to work on Monday, she’d need to do it quickly before it got dark and there was no light.
“But I just couldn’t,” Smith-Thomas said during a recent telephone interview. “I just couldn’t. I got on the freeway and went to Altadena. I grabbed things out of my pantry — items that were nonperishable that I could give — and went out there and helped serve the community in that way.”
Her heart went out to the people who lost their homes during the Eaton Fire, which, according to Cal Fire figures in a Jan. 24 report, has been ranked as the fifth deadliest wildfire in California history with over 9,000 structures in Pasadena and Altadena destroyed.
Smith-Thomas, 60, is always doing something for others. It’s who she is.
In high school, she recalled taking one of those personality assessments — something like a Myers and Briggs test. The results informed her that she was the giving type and someone who must be involved in the community, and even though they indicated that her type typically chooses vocations in the social services, that didn’t keep her from going after a career in fashion, design and merchandising.
A self-described “Valley girl,” Smith-Thomas was born in Encino and spent most of her childhood in the San Fernando Valley. She studied fashion, design, merchandising and business at California State University, Northridge, and out of school she built a successful career in retail and merchandising.
However, that line of work, she said, is not very conducive to raising a family.
“In retail, you don’t have a lot of nights and weekends off,” she said. “No matter what your position is, you’re kind of on call all the time. Holidays and weekends are very important profit areas for retailers. With a growing family, I wanted some holidays and weekends off. The county offered that.”
And so, she began a career in the social services with Los Angeles County. It’s been 25 years since. This month, she’ll have been at the L.A. County Aging and Disabilities Department for 21 years. It turned out that those tests she took back in high school — the ones that told her she’d be in the social services — were right. She said she’s now doing what she’s supposed to be doing.
Smith-Thomas couldn’t get into the details about her work for reasons related to confidentiality, but essentially, she deals with seniors who are neglected or abused. Some of the bigger issues she’s been dealing with currently are money scams, particularly the ones over the phone.
“They (seniors) don’t know anything about Bitcoin, but they don’t want to hear that it isn’t a good deal,” Smith-Thomas said. “We just need them to keep their money in their pockets, because people will bleed them dry and go on to the next victim.”
There was a point in time when Smith-Thomas was living in the Antelope Valley and would pass through the Santa Clarita Valley on her way to and from work. She got a closer look at the community when she happened to be serving clients in the area.
Her love with the place was instant, and in 2013, she found and purchased a home in Canyon Country.
“Someone from the office actually lived in Santa Clarita and said I should consider making a move if I liked what I saw,” Smith-Thomas said. “He confirmed that he felt it was a nice place to raise children. That’s why I ended up here.”
Smith-Thomas’ kids have since become adults. A little over three years ago, she was looking to do more in her community and joined what was at the time the newly formed, all-volunteer nonprofit NAACP Santa Clarita. Again, her need to give, to be involved in community, shone through.
She said her goal in joining the organization was to help promote education, inclusion and engagement. She felt education was a big one. Growing up, Black History Month in school to her was learning about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“We had a connect-the-dot of Martin Luther King and maybe Rosa Parks,” she said. “But there’s so much more to Black history than that.”
She gave a recent example of some unknown Black history covered in the new Tyler Perry movie called “The Six Triple Eight,” which tells the story of the Black women who joined the World War II fight in 1943 to fix the three-year backlog of undelivered mail, an essential service to the troops overseas.
Smith-Thomas also boasted about NAACP Santa Clarita’s program to give five $2,000 scholarships each year to area students.
As for her own experience, she’s seen racial prejudice firsthand. She spoke about her daughter who experienced discrimination when she was in school. As a parent, at the time, Smith-Thomas felt helpless trying to resolve the matter. As part of NAACP, however, she feels she can make more of a difference in situations like that.
“As a group, the goal is to keep a watchful eye out for inequities in our own community,” she said. “We want to make sure people have a place to go, should they feel that there has been some type of injustice.”
Smith-Thomas added that their Santa Clarita branch volunteers are not attorneys, and therefore, they don’t give legal advice. But they’ll hear an individual’s concerns, and if there’s cause for litigation, they’ll forward that to the national NAACP headquarters, where they do have attorneys who can help.
But she said she doesn’t want to be known for only showing up at City Council meetings when there’s a problem. Some of the issues she and NAACP Santa Clarita deal with arise because people, she said, just don’t know each other. As such, she wants to help people get to know each other better.
“When I was saying how I went out to Santa Clara and said, ‘Oh my God, it’s so pretty,’ that guy I know who lived here, he said, ‘Oh, it’s wonderful, you’ll love it, they call it Awesometown.’ Well, when I got here, I’m like, ‘Oh, Awesometown, let’s make it awesome for all.’”
And that brought Smith-Thomas to her third priority: engagement.
She had previously held the position of NAACP Santa Clarita second vice president. Just last month, she became president. In that role, she looks forward to engaging more with the community.
For example, she hopes to continue doing and expanding programs like what the group calls “Small Business Month,” where owners of small businesses in the community come to gatherings to share who they are, what they do and what they offer the community.
Then there’s the group’s WIN committee (Women In NAACP), which helps to include and empower women in the community.
Of course, February is Black History Month, and she’d like to offer more events surrounding that in the future. And she’d also like to grow the group’s Juneteenth event, which she feels is like a family reunion.
“Even though we’re all not related,” she said, “it’s giving us family within the Santa Clarita Valley.”
That, she said, is paramount in her vision.
Asked where that sense of community and that need to give came from, Smith-Thomas said she was uncertain.
“I haven’t tried to try to evaluate it,” she said. “For a brief amount of time, I lived with my grandparents in Jacksonville, Florida. So, I was raised by older parent role models. They were involved in the community, mostly through the church programs that did things in the community. I guess, unless it’s something inherent, it’s something I picked up from them — I saw their involvement in the community.”
Some time ago, Smith-Thomas was in another city and needed to go to Trader Joe’s for a few things. She could’ve run into the one right there, but she decided against it. She waited to get back home to Santa Clarita to go to her Trader Joe’s.
That’s how she operates, she said. She’s all about community — supporting her community, educating her community, making sure no one in her community is left out, and engaging in her community. Don’t be surprised if you see her out in the community doing just that. It’s just who she is.
Know any unsung heroes or people in the SCV with an interesting life story to tell? Email [email protected].
