The RTA is a national nonprofit professional association dedicated to promoting concerns of African Americans and other ethnic groups in parks, recreation and conservation.

A member since 1989, Ward, chair of CSUN¹s Leisure Studies and Recreation Department, was among a select group of national parks and recreation leaders to attend the first "black, brown and green" conference in McAllen, Texas in 1999 to bring together the agendas of people of color with lobbyists from Washington, D.C.

"Over the last few years," she said, "I was barometer of what was going on in different parts of California, being very active in state parks associations."

Two years ago, Ward designed an internship program for the RTA, putting together a manual about what parks and recreation officials do.

In April, Ward presented her paper, "Keepin¹ It Real! Student, Faculty and Community Perspectives Converge Around Campus Commitment to Service Learning," at the Western Region Campus Compact Consortium¹s Fourth Annual Continuums of Service conference in Berkeley.

At the conference, Ward and two students presented a workshop centering around Ward¹s convergence model based on the experiences of two course-embedded service-learning projects conducted at the Therapeutic Living Center for the Blind in Northridge.

Ward joined CSUN¹s Leisure Studies and Recreation Department in 1990 with a master¹s degree in urban recreation development and a Ph.D. in recreation administration.

This fall Ward will teach a class designed to orient students to university life while emphasizing skill development, resource education, team work and computer literacy. She also will teach courses on women, leisure and ethnicity, and women as agents of change.

California State University, Northridge has more than 29,000 full- and part-time students and offers 58 bachelor¹s and 50 master¹s degrees. Founded in 1958, it is the only four-year university in the San Fernando Valley.