The Mayor of Seminole Estates

(BEAVERTON) — When Judy Martinez moved to the Pacific Northwest from Texas, she hesitated to lay down roots.

The cost of living is so much higher out here, she thought, and she didn’t want to settle for buying a house she didn’t love, and it rains all the time. She kept to herself inside her apartment for three years, working 60-hour weeks to distract herself.

“I wasn’t fully invested in my life here,” Martinez said.

One day, she was walking and went in a different direction than usual. Wedged between green spaces, she found Seminole Estates, a retirement community in west Beaverton. Now, she’s honorarily been named mayor of the neighborhood.

“I wasn’t invested in the community until I found this place, so it literally transformed both of our lives,” she said.

She and her husband purchased a home there, and Martinez immediately started getting involved with the community there. After three months of breakfasts, potlucks and resident meetings, her neighbors nominated her to serve on the neighborhood board despite her protests that she didn’t have the time to commit.

“I was like, ‘Well, I guess I’m on the board,’” she said. “I was the vice president of business, so that gave me a chance to learn Oregon rules about how they’re run and how they’re governed.”

During her second term, she took on the role of social director and helped her community connect.

“I watched and listened, and I was lucky to be on the board with some people who had been here a long time,” she said, " not only in Oregon but living here in this community.”

Martinez hit her stride and was on a roll — and then the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

“I was like, ‘Wow, OK, now what do we do? I have all this energy,’” she said. “‘How do I channel it? What do I do with it? How can I help?’”

One of the first things she realized was how much trouble her neighbors needed help finding information about vaccinations and making appointments. So, she got online for them. She’d ask them to write down the information she needed on paper and leave it outside their doors so she could get it and make appointments for them. She also arranged transportation for them to get there.

“Then, I started realizing that a lot of them were afraid to go to the grocery store,” she said.

Martinez registered as a food insecurity manager so she could pick up food boxes for her neighbors and eventually start making meals.

She would hop on her bike, which she decorated to correspond with the current holiday season and deliver the food to her neighbors in need.

But her community was still in crisis.

“We had more people die in that one-and-a-half year, or really locked down in here, than we had ever reported,” she said. “And not one of them had died from COVID.”

Instead, they died because they couldn’t get access to their essential medications, they stopped eating well or because they were simply lonely.

So Martinez started organizing outdoor events, including the neighborhood’s first parade. She started the Caring Corner, making birthday cards and well wishes to remind her neighbors that someone was looking out for them.

“I just try to bring peace and make people happy with silly little things like that. It’s fun and it’s easy and it’s rewarding,” she said. “I don’t want them to feel forgotten.”

She remembers when one of her neighbors died during the pandemic — a woman named Elaine — and at the time, the community celebration of life committee was disbanded, but she wanted to acknowledge her passing and comfort the woman’s husband.

She gathered her neighbors to stand outside their homes at dusk with candles and sing. This is one of the times she felt like she was really making a difference in her community.

Since the pandemic, her operation has grown in response to the changing needs of her neighbors. The neighborhood now has a directory of trusted vendors and handymen because seniors are often victims of scams. She set up a neighborhood Pet Net to help catch the four-legged escape artists who serve as critical companions for their owners. Martinez also runs a medical shed with another neighbor who is a nurse, where they store donated equipment, such as walkers and wheelchairs, for those who need them.

Today, the Mayor of Seminole Estates may be busy, but her heart is full.

“I can’t envision my life without it,” she said. “I look at how much more whole I feel and how much happier I am.”