2023 Unsung Hero Pat Poole: A Lifetime of Service

All her life, Rio Communities resident, Pat Poole says she knew she was here to help people and that is why she was selected as one of this year’s Valencia County News-Bulletin Unsung Heroes.

After joining the Women of Belen, a local women’s group, she helped mobilize them to start gleaning. Poole was inspired by The Women’s Institute in Great Britain, which played a vital role in providing food during World War II to the needy.

“Food security is huge for me,” says Poole. “I’m not secure if my community isn’t secure. So gleaning is a great way to make us more secure.”

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, gleaning is simply the act of collecting excess fresh foods from farms, gardens, farmers markets, grocers, restaurants, state/county fairs or any other sources in order to provide it to those in need.

The Women of Belen started gleaning by picking apricots at a member’s house. Soon, other farmers offered their orchards for the group to glean from.

“As a farmer, I don’t want to see food go to waste. I want to see people eating it,” said Amelia Vogel, owner of Punch Rocket Farm, and who nominated Poole for the honor. “I know that there are definitely problems in this community with food security. She saw a problem; she thought about it; she organized people and she took action. Amazing.”

Eventually, the women had to start turning down orchards to glean at because there were not enough people. The group was out gleaning four times a week and the fruit was starting to build up faster than they could use it.

Poole said the group estimates they’ve picked at least 10,000 pounds of fruit and nuts. The pickers get the first pick of the fruit, then they donate the rest to those who are in need. They donated to the Valencia County Resource Center and Poole distributed free fruit from her home.

Besides the group picking fruit from the trees, they also pick up fruit off the ground to feed various farm animals in the county.

“I did hear some cows got sick of apples and they had to put one pig on a diet. It couldn’t be allowed to have any more apples,” jokes Poole.

The gleaning group became popular, which helped the Women of Belen’s numbers grow, but Poole said they decided to form another group so they would not disrupt Women of Belen and they did not want to alienate men who wanted to help glean.

They called the new group, the Valencia County Food is Free, a chapter of Food is Free, which is an open-source, food-sharing project, originally from Austin, Texas.

“I was born to save the world. I always knew that I was here to help people; to assist,” said Poole.

For the better part of her life, Poole has done her part to help the communities she has lived in.

She grew up in Memphis, Tenn., and became a med tech in a clinic for children in an impoverished area she lived as a child. She then moved to Portland, Ore., where she continued to work in medicine until she got burned out.

While in Portland, she made a life-changing decision to switch from the medical field to the arts. She then moved east and became an artist-in-residence in Ohio and Kentucky. During her time there, she estimates she taught art to about 40,000 students from kindergarten to fifth grade, despite having no formal teaching or art education.

About 20 years ago, Poole and her family moved to New Mexico, where she and her husband, Andrew, continued to make art. Eventually, they opened a small gallery in Belen on Becker Avenue, called the Frank, Lorenz & Poole Gallery. They closed it in February because Poole was getting more involved with the Women of Belen and gleaning.

The next step Poole wants to take with the Food is Free Valencia County, is to teach preservation to the community because they have had people requesting it. They just need to find a commercial kitchen that the group can use.

To get more information about gleaning, or if you would like to contact the group, Poole recommends joining the Food is Free Valencia County or the Women of Belen’s Facebook groups.