They had driven deep into Los Angeles County, Victoria Malone and her son Chace, to reach a treatment facility that might finally help him. He did not meet the criteria. Chace had been sober for a few weeks, the intake staff explained, and was not at the stage the facility required. The family left without referrals, without resources, and without anyone to tell them where to try next.
That was late 2020. On January 2, 2021, Chace Taylor Malone died from an accidental fentanyl overdose. He was 27.
The gap that afternoon exposed is now the organizing principle of everything Malone has built since.
The Impact Foundation LA, which operates under its full name as The Chace Taylor Malone iMPACT Foundation, was incorporated in California on June 4, 2021, roughly six months after Chace’s death. Malone serves as Executive Director. She started the organization together with Chace’s childhood friends, a group who had watched him struggle for years and who felt the same helplessness she had when it mattered most.
Chace had grown up in the foothill communities north of Los Angeles, graduating from Crescenta Valley High School in 2011. His family and friends described him as magnetic: someone who knew hundreds of people and made a habit of seeing each of them at their best. He started his own plumbing business and spent years quietly contending with anxiety and depression that gradually led to substance dependence. In his final weeks, the family had reached out to available resources and made the trip to the county facility. When the door closed behind them with no referrals and no follow-up, they had nowhere left to turn.
The foundation was built to fill exactly that absence. Its core model is a practice it calls Stewardship, pairing each client with a personal Steward, a professional who takes an active role not just in responding to crises but in planning, consistent check-ins, and long-term accountability. As clients stabilize, the design encourages them to become Stewards themselves, extending the cycle of support into the community around them. Services include rehabilitation placement, sober living coordination, connections to licensed mental health therapists, life coaching with ongoing follow-up, long-term mentorship, and family communication planning.
The foundation serves the La Crescenta and Montrose area of Los Angeles County, working with individuals and families dealing with substance misuse, anxiety, depression, and emotional isolation. It is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit and public charity.
Building It Out
By 2022, a second initiative had taken shape alongside the direct services work: CV Cares, the Crescenta Valley Substance Misuse Prevention Coalition. Where the foundation focuses on individuals already in crisis, CV Cares operates upstream, delivering prevention resources and community awareness before a crisis develops. The coalition brings together educators, parents, health professionals, law enforcement, and civic representatives across what the foundation describes as 12 community sectors. In 2023, CV Cares received a Drug Free Communities grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, placing the coalition within the federal drug prevention framework administered through the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, as reported by the Crescenta Valley Weekly.
The programs that give CV Cares its community presence reflect the breadth of what Malone is attempting. The Youth Ambassador Program trains student leaders at Crescenta Valley High School to run peer education campaigns and awareness events; by the foundation’s count, the program engages between 20 and 30 students each month. A Harm Reduction initiative has, according to the foundation, distributed more than 500 Narcan kits and provided overdose response training to more than 200 community members. A Speaker Series has drawn clinical professionals to address mental health, fentanyl risks, harm reduction strategies, and substance misuse prevention.
In 2025, Malone also secured a $50,000 Los Angeles County “Take Action” grant to fund a one-time Wellness Fair. Held May 10, 2025, the event brought health and community resources together at no cost to participants in partnership with Los Angeles County. Unlike an ongoing annual event, the Wellness Fair was a specific grant-funded community initiative.
Chace’s brother Blake, a Los Angeles County firefighter and paramedic, has taken an active role in the foundation’s outreach, joining Malone to bring Narcan training to school communities across the region.
Chace’s story, as Malone has shared it publicly in the years since his death, traces how the gaps compound: years of anxiety and depression that were real but unnamed, a developing brain that had been exposed to powerful prescription opioids during three major surgeries between the ages of 11 and 17, a family that did not know what it did not know, and a treatment system that closed its door on the day they finally reached it. That story now sits at the center of everything the iMPACT Foundation LA does, the reason it builds the structures it does and trains the people it does and shows up in the communities where both are needed.
Five years in, the work shows no sign of slowing. Each November, during Chace’s birthday month, the foundation holds its annual golf tournament in his honor while continuing to expand its coalition partnerships and operate programs across multiple sectors of community life. Malone has described her approach as meeting pain with compassion, isolation with connection, and hopelessness with healing. The record suggests she means it.
