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Dolores “Dodie” Alexander, the founder and longtime leader of the Community Health Awareness Council (CHAC) in Mountain View, died March 20 at age 88.
In 1973, Alexander co-founded CHAC, a mental health resource for children and adolescents. She led the nonprofit from 1973 to 1992 as executive director, crafting a partnership with local cities that ensures public dollars help support youth in need of mental health services. CHAC provides a range of counseling, therapy and substance abuse prevention programs with sliding scale fees, and no one is denied services based on their ability to pay.
CHAC grew out of a grassroots effort by community members, mostly women, who came together over a shared concern about drug and alcohol abuse among adolescents in Mountain View, Los Altos and Los Altos Hills. Rather than rely solely on private donations, Alexander and other CHAC leaders sought to create a new Joint Powers Authority (JPA) between the three city governments, along with the four school districts in the area at the time.
The partnership made sense at the time, said Joan MacDonald, one of CHAC’s founding board members. She said the police chief of Los Altos in the 1970s readily conceded that officers were ill-trained and ill-equipped to deal with kids on drugs and alcohol and lacked expertise on mental health. School districts had a clear reason to support the nonprofit’s mission from the start.
“If the students are suffering in whatever way they are suffering they weren’t able to do the best job of performing, they couldn’t focus on school, they were truant, they were sometimes disruptive in class,” MacDonald said. “CHAC’s presence on campus made a significant difference.”
While Alexander helped create CHAC, she was relutant to become the organization’s leader, MacDonald said. The first executive director had a divergent opinion from the board on the focus of the newly founded nonprofit and left soon after. The interim director who followed was quickly hired away by El Camino Hospital.
“The board, unbeknownst to Dodie, decided that she was really the person who would know what we were after and would help us move forward,” she said. “It was a no-brainer for us, but she was shocked.”
MacDonald said Alexander turned out to be the perfect fit as executive director. Not only was she good at asking for funding from the JPA partners — no one could turn her down — but she was relentlessly positive, friendly and supportive, which elevated the mood around CHAC’s office and pushed employees to work harder, MacDonald said.
“She was like that with every single person who worked there, even when she had to tell them they needed to change something that wasn’t working or had a criticism,” MacDonald said. “She found a way to make it positive.”
CHAC’s scope expanded beyond substance abuse and incorporated mental health therapy, aimed at helping families and children struggling with depression and anxiety. Current CHAC clients may also be experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), neglect, domestic violence, child abuse, divorce, financial stress and homelessness.
“CHAC is able to help families and individuals cope with a wide range of issues,” said Sandy Bergan, CHAC’s board president. ” I truly believe that the community that I live in is a better place because of CHAC, and I have Dodie Alexander and the other women from 1973 to thank.”
As CHAC’s role in the community expanded to meet growing demand for services that are otherwise limited and cost-prohibitive, so too did the nonprofit’s need for funding. With a budget now deeply reliant on service contracts and private donations, less than half of its money comes from the original public agencies that formed the JPA.
It was quickly apparent, as clincial supervisors worked alongside counselors and talked to students and families, that alcohol and drug abuse were not the root cause of the problems, and that something more was driving kids to substance abuse. The decision made CHAC one-of-a-kind in the area, addressing mental health at a time when people would rather stick their heads in the sand.
“The fact that we were talking about it out loud was shocking to some people, and in a way it was hard to get money from others because they weren’t clear about the need, they didn’t think that it happened in our communities,” MacDonald said. “To an extent the stigma is still here … some people still have this naive view that all you have to do is snap out of it, and we know that’s not true.”
Before it relocated in 2013 to its current headquarters on the corner of El Camino Real and View Street, CHAC’s downtown location at 711 Church St. was named the “Dodie Alexander House” in honor of her role founding the organization. In 1982, she was honored with a Community Service Award, in 1997 the Town Crier named her to its Honor Role of 50 Who Made a Difference, and the California State Legislature recognized her for her many contributions to youth, her family said.
Alexander is survived by her five children, eight grandchildren and one great-grandchild. Services will be held at 11 a.m. on Saturday, April 27, at Christ Church Los Altos, located at 1040 Border Road in Los Altos.
In lieu of flowers, the family prefers that memorial donations be made to CHAC at chacmv.org. CHAC Executive Director Marsha Deslauriers announced on Monday, April 15, that the nonprofit will also establish a Dodie Alexander Memorial Fund for those donations, which will go toward paying for counseling services targeted at substance abuse support.
Such a devastating loss. We have lost a true compassionate leader of the community
It was an honour to have ser ed on CHAC’s board. Her legacy will always live on.