Sister Lucy Poulin, who founded homeless shelters in Orland and Ellsworth and who was known throughout Maine for her efforts to minimize rural poverty, died this month.
Poulin, who passed away Oct. 14 at her home in East Orland, was 83.
A native of Fairfield who became a Carmelite nun at the age of 26, Poulin went on to establish Homeworkers Organized for More Employment — more commonly known as H.O.M.E. — in Orland in 1970 as a way to combat rural poverty.
Over decades until her retirement in 2016, Poulin’s vision for providing shelter, community and economic opportunity for those who lacked such things grew to include, among other things, multiple workshops, homeless shelters, affordable housing, a soup kitchen and a farm. The importance of such programs has continued to grow in Maine in recent years as Hancock County and much of the state has faced growing homelessness and housing instability due to soaring housing costs.
“She impacted thousands of people over her four and a half decades of service,” said Tracey Hair, who started as a client at H.O.M.E. and then took over as executive director when Poulin retired. “The hole she has left, it’s bigger than we realized.”
H.O.M.E. was established 53 years ago on a 23-acre site in Orland at the intersection of School House Road and Route 1, initially as a crafts cooperative where local women could market quilts, knitwear and other handcrafted items to earn extra money. In 2016, Poulin told the Bangor Daily News that almost as soon as H.O.M.E. opened, she recognized a larger mission to serve the poor of the area with housing, food, medical care and a material sense of community.
“Basically, there are three reasons people come to us,” Poulin said at the time. “They need a place to live, they want to make the world a better place or they want to take the Gospels seriously.”
She said that taking the Gospels seriously includes honoring the Biblical passage commonly known as the Golden Rule.
“If you truly love your neighbor as yourself,” she said, “you don’t put them in a shelter at night and throw them out on the street in the morning. Everything you have, you want for them as well.”
Poulin said that she paid a price for her vision and for her hands-on efforts to build a community for impoverished people. It set her at odds with the more prayerful Carmelites and led to her expulsion from the order shortly after H.O.M.E. was founded, she said.
“The priest told me I had ‘an incorrect spirit of poverty,’” she recalled. “I wasn’t contemplative enough; I was out here helping people instead. It was very difficult at the time, but I got over it.”
Despite being expelled by her former order, Poulin retained her faith and let it guide her in her mission of fighting poverty, Hair said. She supported advocacy work for people incarcerated in prisons and jails and, at the lakefront property that she called home, provided housing to developmentally disabled adults and animals who needed a place to live.
“Lucy was quick and easy to say ‘yes’ to people when many said ‘no,’” Hair said. “She welcomes everyone at the table.”
Hair said that in the past year Poulin had become sick – she did not go into details – and that she received hospice care for three weeks before she passed away.
A few days before she died, Poulin told her close friends and loved ones that she wanted to be buried naturally and in a way that was consistent with her vision of finding community and purpose through craftsmanship.
“She said she wanted a pine coffin made from local lumber,” Hair said. “Right down to the end, the work of her hands was so important to her.”
The day after Poulin died, friends and loved ones held a private burial at a cemetery site at the Saint Francis Community in East Orland where she lived, Hair said. A memorial service that will be open to the public is scheduled for 10 a.m. Saturday, Nov. 11, at Saint Vincent de Paul Church in Bucksport, according to her obituary.