Conversations with Victoria Malone

Today we’d like to introduce you to Victoria Malone.

Hi Victoria, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
My Story is Our Story…It starts with my sons — and the beautiful, loud, full house that came with them.
From elementary school through high school and beyond, our home was one of those homes friends gravitated to. The door was always open. There was always another face at the table, another voice in the hallway, another young person who somehow found their way to us. I loved every moment of it. Those kids became part of our family — and I became, in many ways, an extention of their care and support to one another.
And then we lost my son, Chace Taylor Malone.
His loss broke something open in all of us. Grief has a way of doing that — it cracks you apart, and in the breaking, it asks you what you are going to do with the pieces.
What happened next still moves me deeply. Chace’s friends — these young people carrying their own grief — came to me with a request. They asked if we could start something. A nonprofit. Something that could help other families have the resources and support that we didn’t have. Something so that another family would not have to learn what we learned the way we learned it.
I said yes.
I felt capable of saying yes — not because grief makes anything easy, but because I had spent years as the Executive Director of the Montrose~Verdugo City Chamber of Commerce. I understood nonprofit infrastructure, community building, and what it takes to turn intention into impact. I had the tools. And Chace’s friends — and his memory — gave me the reason.
That is how The iMPACT Foundation LA was born. Out of love. Out of loss. Out of a group of young people who refused to let that loss be the end of the story.
Five years later, we are still here — still building, still advocating, still opening doors for families, youth, and communities who need connection, resources, and the simple but powerful reminder that they are not alone.
That has always been the heartbeat of this work. It started in my home, around my table, with kids who wanted a place to land.
It still does.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Not even close.
And I say that with full honesty — because I think the people who need what we do deserve to know that nothing about this was easy, and we built it anyway.
First, there is the grief. You cannot separate the founding of The iMPACT Foundation LA from the loss of my son Chace Taylor Malone. I was not building a nonprofit from a place of distance or strategy. I was building it from the middle of the deepest pain of my life. Every step forward was also a step through grief. Those two things existed — and still exist — side by side.
And then there is the reality of building something from nothing. A nonprofit, much like a business, requires an enormous number of steps — many of which you don’t even know exist until you are standing in front of them. You move through the unknowns until they reveal themselves. Finding the right partners, the right support, the right funding — all while trying to be a real resource for individuals and families who need genuine guidance and connection. Not just a list of phone numbers. Real support. Real presence.
Earning legitimacy while you are still laying the foundation is its own kind of challenge. We were asking people to believe in something that was still becoming. And most did — and that meant everything.
But there were also those who didn’t come for the right reasons.
That was perhaps the most painful lesson outside of grief itself. There were people who showed up with their own agenda — who used our name and our mission to open doors for themselves. To be in the middle of grief, in the middle of building something sacred, and experience that kind of betrayal — it shook me.
And then one of Chace’s closest friends — our President, Jerry Lee Butt III — said something that reframed everything for me. He said: “Only those who have already shown up, volunteered, and proven their commitment — before earning a title or a dollar — belong here.”
That changed things. That became our standard.
And what followed was extraordinary. The people who truly carry the essence of Chace — his spirit of showing up, of giving without agenda — they revealed themselves. They were already there. Already working. Already committed before anyone asked them for anything.
That is who we are. That is what we do.
We show up. We support. We get involved in our community and we provide good — so that people see and understand that we are here for all the right reasons.
To be of service. And to help cultivate real, lasting change in our community.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
At its core, The iMPACT Foundation LA exists to build healthier communities through connection, awareness, and advocacy. We focus on mental health and wellness, substance misuse prevention, and recovery support — not as abstract causes, but as living, breathing realities that affect real families in our community every single day.
We specialize in meeting people where they are. That means outreach, education, Narcan training, resource navigation, community events, and partnerships with local organizations, schools, law enforcement, and healthcare professionals. We work to ensure that individuals and families have access to real support — not just a list of phone numbers, but genuine human connection and guidance.
We are known for showing up. In schools. At community events. In conversations most people are afraid to have. We bring those conversations into the open — about mental health, about substance misuse, about grief, about recovery — because silence is where suffering grows.
What am I most proud of?
Without question — our CV Cares Youth Ambassadors program.
What began with two young people willing to stand up and use their voices has now grown into a cohort of fourteen. We are in our third cohort. Fourteen young leaders who are not waiting to be handed solutions — they are creating them. They are trained, they are engaged, they are out in the community doing the work alongside us.
Watching that program grow has been one of the most profound experiences of this entire journey. Because these young people are the living proof that the next generation is not the problem — they are the solution. We just have to trust them, equip them, and get out of their way.
What sets us apart?
We are not a corporate organization operating from the outside looking in. We are a family. A community-based, community-led organization that was born from this community and remains deeply rooted in it.
What truly sets us apart is that the voices driving our work are the voices of the youth in our community. They identify the local problems. They help shape the local solutions. We believe that the people closest to the issue are closest to the answer — and that has guided everything we do.
We are not importing solutions from somewhere else and applying them here. We are listening to our community, learning from our community, and building with our community.
That is the difference. And that is the only way we know how to do this work.

We love surprises, fun facts and unexpected stories. Is there something you can share that might surprise us?
I think most people who know The iMPACT Foundation LA see the advocacy, the events, the outreach — the public face of the mission. What they may not know is how deeply personal and quietly imperfect the person behind it all really is.
I am a mother before I am anything else. And grief does not stop simply because you are busy building something meaningful. I carry Chace with me every single day — into every meeting, every event, every conversation. There are moments in this work that are breathtaking in the most beautiful way. And there are moments that bring me to my knees.
What surprises people, I think, is that I didn’t come from the nonprofit or advocacy world in the traditional sense. I came from community — from years of building relationships, opening my home, and loving people well. That was my training ground. The Chamber gave me the tools. My sons and their friendships gave me the why. And Chace gave me the courage to not waste either of those things.
I think people also might be surprised to know that this organization — as much as it is about serving others — has saved me too. The community we have built, the young people who show up, the families who reach out and say “we didn’t know where to turn and then we found you” — that is what gets me up every morning.
I didn’t set out to build a legacy. I set out to honor my son. And somewhere in that — a community found us, and we found each other.
That still surprises me. Every single day.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://theimpactfoundationla.org/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theimpactfoundation_la/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheImpactFoundationLA?mibextid=uzlsIk
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-impact-foundation-la-701454270/?isSelfProfile=true
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@thechacetaylormaloneimpact6003
• Other: https://www.instagram.com/cvcares/

Image Credits
All photos are from my cell phone photos – all students in the photographs have parent consent forms signed before participating.