A revamped job-skills program and a grant-supported playwriting project are among exciting recent developments at Father Joe’s Villages, San Diego’s largest homeless-services provider.
On Sept. 15, the Father Joe’s Villages Employment & Education Services program moved to a new location at St. Teresa of Calcutta Villa and was renamed Gene Burkard Employment and Education Services. The program helps San Diego homeless find and keep jobs.
A ribbon-cutting ceremony was held at the center’s new location at 1 14th St. in downtown San Diego.
Because loss of income is the primary driver of homelessness in California, Father Joe’s Villages is expanding its resources to help more people find long-term jobs. The move to St. Teresa of Calcutta Villa will complete an expansion that kicked off earlier this year when EES hired three additional staff members to support the program that now has more resources and a larger space to operate.
The new name honors the generosity of the late Gene Burkard, whose multi-million-dollar support helped expand the program and will sustain its services for years to come.
Father Joe’s Villages also has been awarded a $25,000 grant from the Humanities For All grant awards for a playwriting project called Stories of CREED in Action.
Stories of CREED in Action will offer two playwriting residencies to Father Joe’s Villages’ clients in partnership with the San Diego-based nonprofit organization Playwrights Project.
Frank Kensaku Saragosa, a recipient of the PEN Literary Award who has lived experience with homelessness, will be leading the playwriting workshops.
Public performances of the plays will be held at the Morgan Auditorium, in partnership with San Diego Central Library, from June 14 to 16, 2024.
The playwriting workshops will allow people with lived experience to share their stories and the public to get a glimpse of the circumstances they’ve overcome….
From the Southern Cross
PLAYWRITING??? The WPA lives forever in the minds of the Progressives. I was going to call Father Joe’s next week to donate my car. Think I’ll find a recipient who will actually do something for the poor and homeless. Feh!
The primary driver of homelessness everywhere are mental illness and drug addiction. Yeah, let’s waste money by paying druggies to write plays.
The primary driver of homelessness is sudden loss of income and the lack of affordable housing. Drugs and mental illness are secondary causes. Homelessness leads to drug and alcohol addiction.
We need to deal with the root causes.
No, you are quite wrong about that. The majority of homeless people have made a lifestyle choice to be drug addicted. I’m sorry, they cannot be turned normal. They have to be taken off the streets and institutionalized. If you pussyfoot with them and tolerate camping on the street and drug use on the street, the problem will worsen. You’re seeing it happen all over California.
I just read that of all the countries of the world, Japan is the only one to have 0% homeless people. If that is true, then it would be a great idea, to find out why. The United States is a highly developed modern country, and there should be no reason for the current problem of homelessness, here. We can fix this! But to fix things, requires some excellent and necessary sacrifices, discipline, hard work, and effective laws, unpopular with many– that today’s naive political leaders, and many naive constituents, are unwilling to implement— yet. There can be no freedoms, without maturity, self-sacrifice, responsibility, self-control, and obedience to law and order. Utter chaos, radicalism and violence, mental illness, dope addiction, and homelessness, will result in simply having all so-called “personal freedoms” taken away, and a tough, “no nonsense,” Communist-style regime installed, to restore law and order, decency, and discipline. The liberal leftists are very naive– and extremely babyish, immature, in tackling great, big, urgent problems in society. They have no sense of respect for God and for society, nor a grown-up sense of responsibility, maturity, and self-sacrifice, owed to God, and to your family, community, and country.
I was rather considering donating to the Delancey Street Foundation. Any recommendation in favor or against?
When I did fundraising in my diocese, it was stressed to us that the monies raised MUST be used for the intention of the giver. It cannot be used for any other purpose.
But money, as has been recently mentioned, is fungible.
Liberals are great at wasting other people’s money.
People gave to help the homeless, not pay someone to write a play. This is like the Vatican’s Peter’s Pence, promoted as something that helps the needy throughout the world. Yet, donations were used for a gay movie and on luxurious European real estate. Aren’t lying, bearing false witness and fraudulent fund raising still sins? Maybe the perpetrators can get a blessing for their behavior. You know, accompanying them in the concrete circumstances of their lives. Just being permissive, I mean pastoral.
I’m starting a petition to the Oxford Dictionary to have the late, great Fr. Carroll become a verb for donating an automobile: “It was time for me to buy a minivan for my expanding family, so I took my aging sports car to Martha’s Village and I father joe’d it.”
Just don’t “Cardinal McCarrick” anything.🤪