Michael Reinke, the new director of the Nashua Soup Kitchen & Shelter, was sitting in on a class in February 2015 at Duke University, where he worked at the time as the development director for the college’s Sanford School of Public Policy.

A professor said to the students that "every job he had over the course of his career had been a reflection of his values and priorities," Reinke said. "I thought about that. OK, what is my value that I hold most dear?"

Reinke, recalling the event at in his new office at the Soup Kitchen’s Quincy Street location this week, thought to himself at the time, "If it was education, I should stay at Duke. If it was health care, I should go and work in a hospital. I thought the thing that has driven me since I can remember is issues of poverty and how can I help people who are most vulnerable and most at risk in our community.

"That’s what made me think I need to go back into doing work like what we’re doing at the Nashua Soup Kitchen & Shelter."

Reinke, fresh from a job at the Interfaith Council for Social Service in Carrboro, N.C., has taken over for the retiring Lisa Christie, who has run the organization since 1989.

"It’s amazing," Reinke said of the Nashua operation he has taken over. "I’m really, really impressed with what everybody’s done here. "In some ways, this is coming home."

Reinke grew up in western Massachusetts. He spent some of that time in small-town Royalston, eventually moving to Athol.

Reinke said some of his motivation to return to the Northeast was to be closer to family.

"I come from a long background in human services," he said, describing his parents as graduate students in Boston watching "young people marching in the streets; we’re going to end war, make a better world, things like that.

"They thought ‘We’d like to reach out and help those we can touch with our own two hands.’ So after they had me, they adopted four kids. They moved us out to the middle of nowhere" and started a farm.

"We had a guy who was recently released from prison," Reinke said. "It was one of his first jobs. We had a gentleman who was the kind of person you might see on the street today who probably hasn’t had a bath in a couple of weeks and probably looks like he had too much to drink."

He lived in the family’s basement for a few weeks.

When Reinke was a teen, he said, Athol received a grant to start a small shelter.

"Nobody would house it," he said.

His church, St. John Episcopal, stepped in to host the shelter in what he described as underutilized space.

"The woman who was operating the shelter knew me, knew my family, and said, ‘Michael, how would you like a job?’?" Reinke said.

He began working in that homeless
shelter when he was a senior in high school. It had 10 beds.

"I helped run the house," Reinke said. "I was 17."

Over time, Reinke attended seminary school in New York City and started a family. He held several jobs throughout the U.S., tackling housing and other issues.

Along the way, through time spent in social service organizations in Indiana and Bellingham, Wash., he said he realized, "I didn’t meet one that had too much money or too many staff." Reinke decided then that his on-the-job management and fundraising experience pushed him to pursue his MBA while working at Western Washington University.

Something else he saw was that the social service nonprofits with which he had contact were focused on "the gap they see during the day."

"How can you not?" Reinke asked rhetorically, using his current job in Nashua as an example. "We have milk that needs to be bought for the kitchen. … Any given day, we have a hundred, if not more, families going through the pantry.

"But then, there’s the longer-term issue: How do we think about what are the investments we can make in our institution to make a transformational difference in how we do work. That was one of the reasons I was interested in coming to Nashua.

"I’m really interested in how do we move the needle on issues, problems that seem like they’re always with us. We’re always doing something, but it feels like we never get ahead.

"It’s money and it’s resources, but oftentimes, it’s as much as how do we get the right resources to where they need to be as it is we need to grow the pie."

That has led the new director to think how he can bring the organization’s services to people instead of them coming in themselves to the Quincy Street headquarters.

While pedaling his bicycle to a meeting when he arrived in Nashua for his new job, Reinke said he rode past a neighborhood of manufactured homes. He thought that people seeking such a solution to affordable housing or those living in senior housing locations throughout Nashua could also benefit from a mobile food pantry set-up like the Quincy Street location’s walk-through, self-choice setup.

Reinke praised work done by other organizations in Nashua that provide social services, such as emergency and transitional housing and substance abuse assistance.

He had similar praise for the Soup Kitchen’s ongoing work.

"We are light years from where many places are in terms of getting food out there," he said.

"We have a great foundation for providing services. The question is, How can we build upon that foundation?"

Quoting statistics from the food relief network Feeding America, Reinke said, "The cost to the United States in health care alone for people who are food insecure that is directly related to not having enough to eat is about $160 billion a year."

Reinke said 10 percent of the population in Hillsborough County is food insecure, and figured that placed the number at about 8,000 people in Nashua alone.

"If you get kids enough to eat, not only do they not have as many health care expenses, but kids learn better when they have breakfast," he said.

"We are big enough to have big-city problems, but we’re small enough that we actually know each other. My bet is if and when the mayor says, ‘We need to do something about this issue,’ we can get all the players in the same room pretty quickly.

"NSKS has a huge role to play in terms of taking some of the systemic problems associated with poverty. An organization like this, it’s more than any one person. It’s the whole community coming together."

Don Himsel can be reached at 594-1249, dhimsel@nashuatelegraph.com or @Telegraph_DonH.