About us
How We Began
The Act of Recovery Foundation was founded on a simple understanding: healing is not an individual act. It happens in connection with self, community, and the living world.
Veronica Mendoza has spent more than two decades at the intersection of Indigenous cultural advocacy, ecological stewardship, and community healing. As a Chumash lineal descendant, she has watched ancestral waters warm, collapse, and grieve. She has also watched people facing addiction, trauma, and disconnection grieve in the same way. Over time, it became clear these were not separate crises, but the same crisis wearing different faces.
The Act of Recovery Foundation was built to hold both, grounded in the conviction that the health of people and the health of the land are inseparable, and that lasting healing requires responsibility and care.
This is the work we are now building with communities across Santa Barbara and Los Angeles Counties.
Our Vision
Recovery is not a destination. It is a practice of returning again and again to right relationship with self, community, and the living world.
The Act of Recovery Foundation is rooted on the Chumash coast of California, but our work extends beyond it. Indigenous knowledge systems have long understood what science is now confirming. Human health and ecological health are not separate systems. They are one.
We bring people back into connection through direct experience. Gathering, preparing food, stewardship, and shared learning. This is how healing becomes real and how it lasts.
Our Approach
The Act of Recovery Foundation does not design programs around information delivery. We design them around experience, because we understand that awareness alone does not produce transformation. Corrective action does. Embodied encounters with something larger than the pattern do.
Our work is grounded in three principles.
Relationship over instruction. We do not bring people to nature for a field trip. We bring them back to a birthright. Programming is built around doing, tasting, gathering, fishing, preparing food, and sharing stories together. Learning happens in the body, not the classroom.
Peer transmission over top-down programming. People with lived experience of transformation are uniquely effective at accompanying others into it. Our programs are designed to travel through community networks, carried by people who have been through the experience themselves. We are not asking whether peer support works. We are building testable, replicable structures that prove it does.
Indigenous knowledge as method, not backdrop. Traditional Ecological Knowledge is not included in our work as symbolism or cultural framing. It is the mechanism through which our interventions work. Indigenous knowledge systems across the world hold ecological and human health as inseparable. That is not a metaphor. It is a methodology, and it shapes everything we build.
Creating Hope, One Step at a Time
Integrity
Collaboration
Working together is essential to achieving meaningful impact. We foster partnerships and encourage teamwork to create lasting change in Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, and beyond.
Empowerment
Innovation
Join Our Mission Today
Help us build real, measurable change in Santa Barbara County and Los Angeles. Your support directly funds food access, land-based healing, and community-led programs.