SLO County grocery store worker is feeding homeless people for free — and he needs help
This is the first in a series of reports highlighting Holiday Hometown Heroes on the North Coast.
Can one person make a difference?
Ask Mike Nordquist of Cambria. He began his quest to feed and help Cambria’s homeless population by befriending and giving food to one man.
Now, with the help of recently recruited volunteers and using donated groceries, Nordquist and his team are feeding 17 unhoused people about every day.
How grocery store worker started feeding homeless people
It all began a couple years ago, Nordquist recalled.
After his daily shift as a cook and deli clerk at Soto’s Truth Earth Market, he said, “I’d spark up a conversation” with a homeless man who hung out in the alley behind the store.
Finally, “I asked my boss if, instead of throwing stuff away, I could deliver it to homeless people,” Nordquist recalled, and his boss enthusiastically agreed.
Nordquist’s efforts grew slowly over the next two years.
“Cambria being where it is, with lots of tourists and nice weather,” he said, “we’ll get more than our fair share of homeless (people). They can panhandle, beg or get money from the tourists, who’ll never see them again. … The homeless are living off the tourists, just like the town does.”
Recently, Nordquist has been acting as a sort of registered go-between. He helps homeless people sign up with two food banks, and then collects the foodstuffs for them.
Nordquist gets other donations from such Cambria stores as Soto’s, Mojo’s Village Bean coffee shop and French Corner Bakery. And now community donors are contributing help, food, goods and funds.
With those in hand, Nordquist provides many of the North Coast’s unsheltered residents and visitors with food and other things they need, often distributing those items from a “free to you” table he sets up on Thursdays in or near food bank giveaways in Cambria. (There is no food bank giveaway on any fifth Thursday in a month, so he doesn’t man a table then, either.)
For most of the past two years, Nordquist stored at his own home any items that the homeless recipients couldn’t use quickly or cook properly, especially perishables that need to be refrigerated or kept frozen. Those foods were included in meals that he cooked himself and delivered to his clients
Cambria man needs helpers
On Oct 22, realizing he couldn’t continue to do it all himself, Nordquist sought helpers online. In true North Coast fashion, within three days, 18 area residents had volunteered and/or donated to the cause, and he now has about 10 regular helpers on his team.
More helpers are always welcome, even though Nordquist’s tasks now include coordinating and scheduling.
The volunteers help cook and package the foods in their own homes, but don’t deliver the meals that Nordquist takes to the homeless people.
“I’m 6-foot-2 and I teach self-defense,” he said, and his clients already know him. He advised that “most people shouldn’t go into the camps” themselves.
Food and home goods are what Nordquist thinks his homeless clients need most, rather than money that might go for drugs or alcohol.
“I’ve yet to meet any of them that haven’t been subject to abuse — mental, substance, physical,” he said, ranging from childhood trauma to “PTSD from military service.”
Nordquist has seen that many of the homeless people have “unaddressed mental problems like depression and antisocial behavior … and physical disabilities. There’s a reason why they’re living on the edges of humanity. It’s because they’re broken.”
He’s also requested help washing returned containers, and donations of to-go supplies, such as clamshell and inexpensive plastic containers and disposable utensils, plus paper towels, toilet tissue, zip-top bags, jars with lids and bottled water.
How to help
Monetary contributions can go to www.paypal.me/stonewolf80; get details by emailing stone_wolf_@hotmail.com.
As Nordquist said, “I’m happy to donate my time, but I also have expenses and any help you can give me to help them would make a world of difference.”
For Cambria’s homeless population, he said, giving them “hot food is best. It’s hard to abuse that.”
