Bruland is the chief program officer at Father Joe’s Villages and lives in La Mesa.
If you came on the Village campus in the fall of 1998, you maybe would have seen me during my once-a-month visit to San Diego. If you’ve come onto the Village campus in 2023, odds are even better that you’ve seen me. What gives? Well, the summer of 1998, I was in Las Vegas, working as the executive director of a program dedicated to providing shelter for families who were experiencing homelessness. Thankfully, a new resource had come to town called the Crisis Intervention Center with amazing staff motivated by all the right things. They, like me, were called to work with people who hadn’t caught many breaks in life, with the daily miracle being that they were still alive. We teamed up and tremendous things happened as a result.
Then this rather mysterious man, named Harvey Mandel, who was connected to that marvelous Crisis Intervention Center, during his once-a-month visits to Las Vegas started coming to the city’s Homeless Coalition meetings, for which I was the vice-chair. He would frequently reference a man named “Father Joe Carroll.” One day he asked if I would consider becoming the director of social services for MASH Village in Las Vegas. Don’t think of the TV show — MASH stood for Mobilized Assistance Shelter for the Homeless and was the entity that operated that incredible Crisis Intervention Center and also provided shelter for families and single women.
Read more at the link below.
