Central Coast Success Stories: Pastor Carl Nielsen
SANTA MARIA, Calif. – Carl Nielsen is passionate about photography. For a photo of the Cologne Cathedral, where the three wise men are said to be buried in Germany, he waited and waited for the light to be just right.
“It was just like, Bam!,” Nielsen said as he looked at the blown-up photograph that hangs in his office. “I knew once the lights came on the cathedral and the dusk came, it kind of created this ethereal look. I love doing this!”
He’s turned his passion for taking pictures into a passport stamped on six continents.
“I sit at my desk sometimes and pinch myself that I really did that,” Nielsen said. “And that I got to see those things. It’s just unbelievable.”
The Bethel Lutheran Pastor didn’t take his first picture until his senior year in high school when he took a photography class. He worked hard to learn the craft, becoming good enough that a Christian travel company offered him free travel in exchange for his pictures of each trip. Nielsen has been doing that for 15 years, nearly as long as he’s been in Santa Maria.
“I have come back changed by my world travel,” Nielsen said. “And I want to help bless other people.”
Inspired by a trip to New Orleans where thousands of people came together to clean up the community after the devastation from Hurricane Katrina, Nielsen started Serve Santa Maria in 2010. He called on the community to help beautify schools and parks, and clear out people’s homes who could never do all the work themselves. People like Bill Smalley. He builds bicycles with donated parts, giving some away to the homeless.
“I could not do this without them,” Smalley said. “It would take trucks and a lot of manpower.”
Jobs that would take weeks and months are finished in just a few hours with people working together to help their neighbors.
“It’s unbelievable what is being done,” Nielsen said. “The city claims that we have saved them thousands, tens of thousands of dollars.”
Nielsen documents it all with a video crew. This year, he led the 10th Serve Santa Maria event, and he was chosen by the city as the first Spirit of Santa Maria Award Recipient.
“The real story is not about me,” Nielsen said. “I might have had a good idea, but it’s all the people who have bought in to this vision. All these volunteers that come out are really the power force behind this.”
The next Serve Santa Maria event is tentatively set for April of 2016. Once again, hundreds of people will get up early on a Saturday and head down to the Abel Maldonado Community Center where they will chose a job for the day. Nielsen will send them off to the job sites with some inspiring words and a bag lunch, and a few hours later, they will head home knowing they helped make their community a better place.
