When Joy and Jack Brandt stopped for gas in Nebraska over five decades ago, a gas station attendant told them to find Henie Foss and the Foss Company when they made it to Colorado. That stranger’s advice now looks like 53 years calling Golden home.

It's Joy whose fingerprints run deepest through GCF’s history. She has served as a volunteer, board member, president, and advisor for more than three decades — including helping organize GCF's first gala in 1975 — and still serves today as a board advisor.

Away from GCF, Joy built her real estate career on a simple standard: showing up for what her customers need. She's a licensed broker with RE/MAX Alliance in Golden and has sold homes in Golden and the surrounding area for forty years.

Her civic footprint runs wider still. Joy has been involved with GURA, Golden's Parks and Recreation efforts, and the Downtown Redevelopment Committee. She's past chair of the Golden Chamber of Commerce's Ambassadors (she still has the gold jacket,) — a Chamber director, past president of Leadership Golden, and a board member of the Jefferson Symphony Orchestra. She also sat on the city's recreation committee, where she helped put a community rec center on the ballot in the 1980s. After an initial failure, the bill narrowly passed and The Golden Community Center still stands as mainstay of Golden.

"We were the rabble-rousers," Joy says. "We were the ones who always wanted change."

That decades-long commitment earned Joy and Jack the Golden Chamber of Commerce's Civic Award in 1990 and the Golden Landmarks Association's Living Landmark Award in 2018.

Jack sums up how the two of them think about all of it: "We were put on this earth to help people." That belief runs through their work with the Golden Welcome Center, their church, and Mean Street, a West Colfax ministry serving people experiencing homelessness — alongside Joy's decades with Golden Civic Foundation.

August is Make a Will Month at GCF. It's a fitting moment to consider, as Joy has for more than fifty years, what we each leave for Golden's next chapter.