Making life easier for Mountain View’s unhoused
by Malea Martin / Mountain View Voice
When Mountain View RV resident David Schaack hears a knock at his door every Monday at 5 p.m., he knows what’s waiting for him on the other side: a friendly smile, and a warm, nutritious meal.
Schaack is one of dozens of people living in their RVs who receive warm dinners every week from local residents who volunteer their time to pick up and distribute the meals to safe parking sites and street-parked RVs in Mountain View. The program started early on in the pandemic as a branch of Community Seva, a Bay Area nonprofit that has fed the homeless at local shelters for the past decade.
When the pandemic first hit, Community Seva founder Nathan Ganeshan said shelters temporarily closed to outside services, so he had to find a new way to get food to local unhoused people. Meanwhile, restaurants were struggling with a downturn in business.
So Ganeshan thought of a win-win solution: Community Seva would sponsor the purchase of nutritious meals from local restaurants, giving them some business, and then utilize its already extensive volunteer network to pick up and distribute those meals to hungry people throughout the Bay Area.
“We identified restaurants in multiple locations – one in Evergreen, one in Fremont, one in Milpitas and one in Mountain View – so that it is geographically placed and easy for volunteers to go pick up the food and drop off,” Ganeshan said.
For Mountain View, that restaurant is Cooking Papa, a Chinese eatery that has since moved its operations to San Francisco, but continues to support Community Seva’s Mountain View meal distribution, which recently increased the number of weekly meals it serves. Since the pandemic started, Community Seva has distributed 15,000 free meals to unhoused and RV residents in Mountain View.
Volunteer Leif Thesen leaves a hot meal for a resident at the Shoreline safe parking lot in Mountain View on Feb. 13, 2023. Photo by Magali Gauthier.
Schaack, who lives at the Shoreline safe parking lot, said the meals do more than fill hungry stomachs.
“There are some times where I’m not feeling well or I just don’t feel like going anywhere and they show up and it just happens to hit the perfect timing, it hits the spot,” he said. “The meal program (also) keeps the people who wouldn’t normally be engaged, at least engaged twice a week with outsiders.”
That engagement with the community, Schaack said, makes him feel like “we’re not totally forgotten.”
“There are people out there that really do care about people,” he said.
Community Seva is one of a network of organizations and companies that are aiming to make life easier for people living in RVs, vehicles or on the streets in Mountain View.
