Angel Ledesma: The ninth life is the charm

MOSES LAKE — When Angel Ledesma, director of the Moses Lake-based Columbia Basin Cancer Foundation, looks back on her life, she compares herself to a cat who’s had nine lives and at least as many careers.

Born and raised in Moses Lake, she studied at Washington State University before getting work in agriculture in the Wenatchee area for about a decade. She eventually moved to eastern Oregon where her parents, also Moses Lake transplants, farmed. She and her sister opened a little cafe in the small town of Echo, unlocking their doors before dawn to serve food to farmers and laborers before they went to the fields for the day.

She pivoted again before long, finding work in sales and distribution for the wine industry, helping to get bottles of vino into bars and grocery stores. After she decided to get married and found herself back in Moses Lake, she got work at the other side of the bar with Imbibe, a local wine and art bar which has since closed.

It was due to that experience behind a bar that Ledesma first found herself involved with the cancer foundation, which needed volunteers to run the bar at the annual Country Sweethearts benefit auction, the foundation’s largest fundraiser of the year.

Things began to click into place from there. Ledesma, who was now pregnant, didn’t want to run the bar at Imbibe anymore and was looking for a new opportunity. At the same time, the cancer foundation was losing its marketing director.

Word of the volunteer bartender with sales experience made its way up through the grapevine, and Ledesma accepted the job offer that came, starting her current job with the cancer foundation in the summer of 2012. For a consummate salesperson, it was a perfect opportunity that came at the right time.

“I’ve always been a salesman, all my life,” Ledesma said. “This was perfect because it, it’s not sales in that you’re selling somebody something, but it’s something I’m passionate about and being in charge of fundraising, I’m really comfortable asking for money for something like this.”

The foundation, originally named the Moses Lake Cancer Foundation, was created 20 years ago after its founder, Howard Gallion, lost his wife, Lois, to cancer. The Gallions had moved to Moses Lake in 1993, and were surprised to learn there was no cancer treatment center in the area.

The foundation doesn’t provide treatment, but rather financial support for patients. Grant County residents still need to travel to Wenatchee or farther to access the vast majority of cancer treatments, adding substantial travel costs to the already staggering bills that come with cancer.

Much of the cancer foundation’s work over the years has been to mitigate these and other costs, donating prepaid grocery and gas cards to cancer patients, donating wigs to those going through chemo, providing meals to cancer patients and more. There’s also a major project underway to raise funds to build a radiation facility locally in partnership with Confluence Health, which has already raised over $2 million, so that patients could have treatment options in town.

The current coronavirus outbreak has complicated some of the services that the foundation provides, and Ledesma recalls a sort of dead calm for the first week or so after the virus hit Grant County, as staff tried to figure out how to proceed. But cancer treatment has not stopped during the pandemic, Ledesma said, so neither has the cancer foundation.

“The pandemic has really not affected what we do for our community,” Ledesma said. “We have closed our doors and are seeing people by appointment only, just for the safety of everybody, but otherwise things haven’t changed much.”

It’s Ledesma’s job to ensure that the organization raises the funds necessary to keep all of those projects running, whether by holding fundraisers or by calling up people to ask for donations.

All the while, Ledesma said, the job brought her into contact with patients fighting for their lives but who often managed to maintain a good outlook and a positive attitude. Their stories inspired Ledesma and added weight to the work that she did.

“Early on, I realized that this was not just another job,” Ledesma said. “People count on us, and any little thing we can do while they’re going on this cancer journey is huge. Those little things are the things that make a difference.”

Five years into the job, after she had seen the kind of difference the foundation’s services could provide for families going through a cancer diagnosis, the point was driven home for Ledesma, when her father was diagnosed with lung cancer. Though she couldn’t have known that the day would come when cancer would hit her own family, Ledesma said that she felt it was one of many reasons why she ended up with the foundation, preparing her for what was to come.

“My experience with all of the cancer clients that we help, seeing what they do in the face of this, was a tremendous help and inspiration when going through it with my dad,” Ledesma said.

Today, Ledesma is nearly eight years into her job with the cancer foundation, having made it through her own father’s fight with cancer and most of a global pandemic. Though there have been many twists and turns that have shaped her nine lives up to this point, Ledesma said that she’s in no rush to pivot to a new chapter.

“There were people in my life like, you could go here, you could do this, you could do that,” Ledesma said. “But this is something that, for me, was a passion, and the rewards are so much larger than monetary value. I’m very social and I like to throw events, I like to help people. I like to give back.”

Emry Dinman can be reached via email at edinman@columbiabasinherald.com.