In the winter of 2020, Victoria Malone drove with her son Chace and her ex-husband to a Los Angeles County treatment facility they had spent a long time locating. Chace had been struggling with anxiety, depression, and substance misuse for years. He was 27 years old and had agreed to try treatment.
The facility turned them away. Chace had been sober for a few weeks, the staff explained, which meant he no longer met their intake criteria. No referrals were provided. No resource list. No next call to make. The three of them walked out with nothing.
Chace Taylor Malone died January 2, 2021. The official cause was accidental overdose. A pill he took that night contained fentanyl, something the coroner later confirmed he had no knowledge of.
Within months, Malone incorporated The Impact Foundation LA in California. She was not a nonprofit veteran. She was a life and wellness coach who had spent the better part of a year watching her family try to navigate a system with no guides and no clear next steps. She decided to build what had not been there.
A Community Held Up by Connection
The foundation, based in the foothills community of La Crescenta-Montrose north of Los Angeles, works by connecting people in crisis with services and sustained human support. Rehabilitation placement, sober living coordination, referrals to licensed therapists, life coaching, long-term mentorship, and family communication planning are all part of what the foundation describes as a coordinated, individualized approach to recovery, designed to meet each person where they actually are.
At the center of the model is Stewardship. Borrowing from the sponsor-sponsee framework familiar in recovery communities and expanding it, the foundation pairs each client with a designated Steward, a consistent contact who takes a proactive role in planning, check-ins, and care rather than waiting to be called. By the foundation’s account, the intention is to build into the recovery process the kind of consistency whose absence so often derails it. Those who stabilize over time are encouraged to become Stewards themselves, extending the cycle forward.
Malone serves as Executive Director and holds a seat on the Crescenta Valley Chamber of Commerce board. The foundation is a registered 501(c)(3) public charity, incorporated June 4, 2021.
CV Cares: Twelve Sectors, One Mission
In 2022, the foundation launched CV Cares, the Crescenta Valley Substance Misuse Prevention Coalition. Where the foundation’s direct services focus on individuals and families, CV Cares takes a systems-level approach, drawing together 12 community sectors including schools, healthcare providers, law enforcement, local businesses, faith organizations, and youth groups to coordinate prevention work across the region.
The coalition’s programs place young people at the center. The CVHS Cares Youth Ambassador Program trains student leaders at Crescenta Valley High School to serve as peer educators, organizing awareness campaigns and community initiatives on a monthly basis. In 2025, Malone wrote a grant application to Los Angeles County’s “Take Action” program and was awarded $50,000 to put on a Wellness Fair. The one-time event brought mental health and substance misuse resources together in a single accessible public space and drew hundreds of participants in May 2025.
A Speaker Series convenes clinicians and harm reduction advocates for community talks covering topics from fentanyl awareness to mental health and neurology. On the harm reduction side, the foundation reports distributing over 500 Narcan kits and providing overdose response training to more than 200 community members.
In 2023, CV Cares was recognized under the Drug-Free Communities program, a federal grant initiative administered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy and given to community coalitions that demonstrate functioning cross-sector prevention infrastructure. The designation was confirmed in coverage by the Crescenta Valley Weekly.
The Name Behind the Work
Chace Taylor Malone was born November 18, 1993 in Glendale, California. His family and the childhood friends who helped build the foundation after his death describe him as someone with an instinct for other people’s best qualities: the friend who checked on an elderly woman long after a plumbing job was done, the one who stood up for whoever was overlooked. He started his own plumbing business as a young man. The anxiety and depression that deepened in his final years, and the substance misuse that followed, were not, in his mother’s telling, who he was.
The organization now carries his full name: The Chace Taylor Malone Impact Foundation. Each November, during Chace’s birthday month, the foundation holds its annual golf tournament in his honor.
In a profile published by the Crescenta Valley Weekly in July 2026, Malone described the idea that finally set the foundation’s direction. Chace had told her, as a small child, that he had chosen her. If that was true, she concluded, then the only worthy response to losing him was to take everything he gave her and share it with the community that helped shape him. She has put the same principle into words on the foundation’s own pages: that real impact begins when pain is met with compassion, isolation with connection, and hopelessness with healing, one person, one family, one community at a time.
What started with a mother and a circle of childhood friends determined that other families should not face the same empty sidewalk has grown into a foundation with a board, a staff, a CDC-recognized coalition, and a coordinated network of sectors working together across the Crescenta Valley.
