On a spring afternoon in 2025, Victoria Malone stood at the front of a graduating senior assembly at Crescenta Valley High School, one of five community providers invited to address students at one of the sharpest transitions in a young person’s life. She did not deliver a lecture. She handed over something more useful: the specific knowledge that support exists, and how to reach it.
That kind of presence, practical and in the right room at the right moment, is how The iMPACT Foundation LA tends to operate. And it is work that its founder arrived at through a loss she has described, in her own words, as the most devastating a mother can experience.
Chace Taylor Malone was born November 18, 1993 in Glendale, California. By his family’s account, he was the kind of young man people were drawn to: charismatic, caring, and possessed of an energy that made everyone around him feel genuinely seen. He started his own plumbing business. He had, as those who knew him have described it, a rare gift for finding the best in people and holding it up. His full story is told on the foundation’s website.
He also struggled. For years, Chace dealt with anxiety and depression that eventually led to substance abuse. He died on January 2, 2021. He was 27 years old. The foundation Malone built in his name reflects not just that loss, but her understanding of what surrounded it: the years of silent suffering, the stigma that often keeps mental health struggles from being named and addressed, and the way both can shape what comes next.
“The iMPACT Foundation LA was born from the most devastating loss a mother can experience, and transformed into the most purposeful work I have ever done,” Malone has said. “Every program we build, every connection in the community we strengthen, and every young person we reach is a loving living testament to Chace Taylor Malone, whose memory now drives a movement dedicated to ensuring no family walks the same road alone.”
She incorporated the organization in California five months after his death, on June 4, 2021. By that December, the foundation had been welcomed into the Crescenta Valley Chamber of Commerce, where Malone had long served on the board. What began in the immediate aftermath of grief now had a legal structure, a board of directors, and a mission statement.
The organization does not function as a direct clinical provider. It works as a navigator. Services include connecting individuals with rehabilitation facilities that fit their needs, coordinating placements in structured sober living environments, linking people with licensed therapists and counselors, and providing life coaching and ongoing follow-up support, as well as helping families communicate through recovery. At the center of the model is what the foundation calls Stewardship: each person seeking help is paired with a designated steward who provides consistent, proactive support over time, including planning and regular check-ins. As clients stabilize, the model encourages them to become stewards themselves, extending care outward to others on similar paths.
“True impact begins when we meet pain with compassion, isolation with connection, and hopelessness with healing,” Malone says, “one person, one family, one community at a time.”
In 2022, the foundation launched CV Cares, short for the Crescenta Valley Substance Misuse Prevention Coalition, as an initiative focused on prevention at the community level rather than crisis response. Where the foundation’s individual services work with people already in need, CV Cares works upstream. The coalition brings together 12 community sectors, including schools, law enforcement, healthcare providers, civic organizations, and youth-serving groups, around a coordinated approach to substance misuse prevention. It received a grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which the Crescenta Valley Weekly reported in 2024 confirms its status as a program under the White House Drug-Free Communities initiative.
Under that framework, CV Cares runs a Youth Ambassador Program at Crescenta Valley High School, training student leaders to organize peer education campaigns and community awareness events; the foundation reports between 20 and 30 students are engaged each month. In 2025, Malone also secured a $50,000 grant from Los Angeles County through its “Take Action” program to fund a one-time Wellness Fair, bringing mental health and substance misuse resources together in a free public event. The fair, held May 10, 2025, drew hundreds of participants, according to the foundation. A Speaker Series has hosted expert-led talks on topics from harm reduction strategies to fentanyl awareness. The foundation also reports distributing more than 500 Narcan kits and providing overdose response training to more than 200 community members.
The work has been extending well beyond La Crescenta and Montrose. In spring 2025, Malone traveled with her son Blake, a Los Angeles County firefighter and paramedic, to El Tejon Schools to lead Narcan training for staff and students in a district far outside the foundation’s immediate base. She has spoken at school assemblies and wellness events and brought the foundation’s resources into community spaces across the region.
Before building the organization, Malone spent years as a life and wellness coach and as executive director of the Montrose-Verdugo City Chamber of Commerce. In a 2023 profile published by Bold Journey, she described that combination of experiences as giving her every teaching tool she would eventually need. When the opportunity to build something permanent arrived, she took it.
The foundation’s fifth Chace Taylor Malone Golf Tournament was scheduled for November 7, 2025. Held every November in honor of Chace’s birthday month, the tournament has become one of the foundation’s signature events and a way for the community to come together in his memory.
More than four years in, The iMPACT Foundation LA continues doing the work it was made for: meeting people where they are, in the foothill neighborhoods north of Los Angeles, in the name of a son who saw everyone at their best.