Irene De La Cruz: Retiring from your job doesn’t mean retiring from your community

In my travels around Merced County, I’ve met many people who are making differences in their communities, dealt with organizations providing much-needed services and discovered new projects being launched to tackle local issues.

But there is a common thread that runs through all of these – the desire to better the community.

The opportunity to give back or help others presents itself at different stages of one’s life. If we are fortunate with our physical and mental health after retirement, it’s good time to recognize there is more that we can do to contribute to our community.

In this column, I am focusing on one person, Pat Ramos, who moved to the Merced County community of Santa Nella a few years ago. I briefly mentioned her in one of my previous columns, but this time I wanted to take a closer look at her because she’s a great example of what a person can do after leaving the work force.

Pat and her husband, Barry, are retired, but you wouldn’t know it from their civic involvement in this small town of about 1,400 residents. Santa Nella, located northeast of Pacheco Pass, was formerly known as Santa Nella Village, and historically comes from the name of a ranch back in the 1800s known as Rancho Centinela (aka Sentinel Ranch).

They moved to move to Santa Nella seven years ago to retire. They became residents of Merced County but continued commuting to San Jose for two years before actually leaving their jobs. Now they are among the movers-and-shakers in that community.

Pat is not afraid to speak up and voice her opinion on matters that affect the livelihood of the residents. She does it because it’s the right thing to do, not for self interest.

Highly educated, she is a graduate of San Jose State University and had an extensive career in public service for the city of San Jose for 32 years. Her work with the community at large demonstrates her commitment to public service.

She is a past commissioner of Santa Clara County, has developed and implemented recreational programs, worked with budgets, grants, agency partnerships and numerous community projects. This is just a partial list of all her accomplishments, but it is an example of the type of experience she brings to Santa Nella, and now she is using it to better the community.

Santa Nella is a good community that grown tremendously throughout the years, but there is always room for improvement. Because of her experience, Pat knew very well how to navigate her way through the proper channels of government to bring positive changes in Santa Nella. Her efforts have helped increase the awareness of civic engagement and involvement in community affairs.

Although Pat is retired, she continues to display the energy, will, determination the experience to continue giving back to her community. In fact, in the last election she ran for the Santa Nella water board and won with 42 percent of the at-large votes. She and another resident, Paul Villareal, are the first Latinos to serve on the water board since 1965.

She comes from a small-business background and from Latino parents who were very instrumental in providing opportunities for other Latinos. Along with her parents, she and her four siblings marched with Cesar Chavez in Salinas.

From the short time that I have known Pat, I have seen she is truly dedicated to equal opportunity and inclusiveness of all parties involved in whatever task or project she is working on. She could have easily taken a back seat and watch things happen without participating, but her ability to bring people together to help find a solution to a problem was her preference.

When you get to know Pat and talk to her, you find she is a tremendous source of information and knowledge, and is passionate about her involvement in the community. She, like others, has seen that positive change can occur when it’s done for the right reasons.

She’s one to learn from and someone who is valuable to a community with different needs.

As more and more of us are heading into that age of retirement, remember that we are on this Earth for a very short period of time, so why not make the best of it with what we have. And something we all have is the capability to learn.

But it’s what you do with it that really counts. Share the wealth, give back to someone or to your community, because you do matter – just like Pat matters in the community of Santa Nella.

This story was originally published January 23, 2015 at 10:00 AM with the headline "Irene De La Cruz: Retiring from your job doesn’t mean retiring from your community."