Laura Pople- Making a Difference that Matters

This is Laura Pople. She is an executive director of Seer Farms, a shelter for animals who have owners in crisis. Laura is also a President of Jersey Pride and is responsible for organizing NJ's Annual LGBTI Pride Festival in Asbury Park. As Machete Media Productions’ resident blogger, I would like to at least try to pass her positive, caring personality and genuinely great belief in humanity onto anyone reading this article and looking for serious altruistic inspiration.

Laura’s story is a one woman’s mission to care for animals that have been abandoned because of Hurricane Sandy or other unanticipated dealings and her paradigm advocacy towards the LGBTI community is a tale of one dedicated activists who strives to make a difference and ease the suffering for both people and animals.

You can find many similarities between Laura Pople and Bridget Machete, director of “Asburied In Time.” Growing up Bridget’s mom owned a pet day care service company for when families didn't want to leave their pet in a shelter. During Irene, Bridget actually fostered a family of 5 kittens about a month old and during Sandy she rescued a calico cat which she found in her bushes. Naturally, the interview with Laura Pople on Saturday July 26th took a form of a conversation and great exchange about the issue of pet ownership and extreme situations that force people to resign from it on temporary basis. The loss of home and financial stability can be especially painful and a lot of pet owners are put in pretty dire situations where they have to abandon their beloved pets. Laura never fails to see the good in people and she acknowledges that people who left their pets while they fled for their lives during Sandy did leave weeks-worth of food and water with the best intention of coming back for their pets.

The people she helped already know and trust her, and in many cases her organization is a fallback that provides families facing domestic disturbance, monetary disorder, a health emergency, natural disaster or other life calamities time to reinstate their lives by caring for their animals until the family can be together again.

As a former American Red Cross shelter worker who volunteered in states affected by Hurricane Katrina, Pople was motivated by the requests of people forcefully disconnected from their pets during disasters and that’s when she came up with an idea to help pet owners displaced by Hurricane Katrina save their animals. But the most recent problem to raise its horrid head came with super storm Sandy which smashed parts of Jersey Shore and displaced its citizens. This is when Laura 's organization was needed the most. More than 200 displaced Sandy animals have found transitory harbor at Seer Farms while their families reconstitute their lives and their houses. By this time more than half of these animals have returned home.

While each disaster creates its own unique circumstances and special needs, Seer Farms offers services that are flexible and may be adapted to meet the specific needs of the family in crisis. Seer Farms survives almost entirely through volunteers and donations. Volunteers do all of the dog walking, spending time with the animals, cleaning litter boxes and dog enclosures. Contributions from the community supply the shelter with food and essentials to care for the pets. For more information about Seer Farms and how you can help please go to www.seerfarms.org.

Another important aspect of Laura Pople’s activist career is the Jersey Pride. Laura is one of the founders and is a president of this non-profit organization since its initiation eighteen years ago. Asbury Park hosts the annual Pride Parade and this year was the most populated yet. In the past forty years Asbury Park has been a welcoming home to the Gay community. Gays have been seeking an independent place on the north east outside of the typical NYC areas for century but have been stymied at every turn. Asbury Park is a very open and accepting place and since the 1950s it has had an emergent gay community. In closed circles they were called "DINKS" which stood for double, income, no, kids and after the property prices plunged, "DINKS" from New York City bought and reestablished Victorian and ocean front homes, leading to a major transformation in parts of the town.

Laura Pople is also a president of the New Jersey Lesbian and Gay Coalition and its Personal Liberty Fund, which is dedicated to fighting discrimination focused on sexual orientation or gender identification, improving the quality of the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered societies through edification, political awareness, legal action, reform, and community activism. NJLGC was influential in the passage of an amended law against discrimination and domestic partnership legislation.

It seems every time team Machete Media Productions goes to Asbury Park to film interviews, we are deeply impressed with the people we meet. They are all doing important, life-changing work. Laura’s work is a unique hybrid of harboring love and healing as well as promoting faith in humankind. In conclusion I allowed myself to share a video Laura has posted on her Facebook page just to give you an idea of what kind of love I am talking about.

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