Small on purpose. Built to go deep.
A high-performance coaching and consulting company for men in recovery, and for the families who love them.
Right now, every man who works with RAW Recovery & Wellness works directly with our founders and lead coaches. That's by design.
Men were getting sober, and then getting stuck.
Dave Alexander founded RAW in 2013. Over the next decade it grew into 14 sober living homes across Southern California, and more than 900 men lived in them. Again and again, Dave watched the same thing happen. A man would do the hardest thing he'd ever done. He'd stop. He'd stabilize. And then he'd land in a life that was quieter, but not more alive.
Same pressure, new outlet. Work, screens, control, rage. Sober, and still bracing.
Most recovery support is built to keep a man from going back. Far less is built to move him forward. That gap is why RAW exists.
Then the work found its shape.
This version of RAW wasn't one person's plan. It came together through the people who found each other.
Through Dave's wife
Melissa met Dave through his wife. The two women had spent time together in Idaho doing deep work: personal growth, recalibration, and advanced modalities of healing and high performance. In 2025, Melissa and Dave began building together.
A father's referral
When Thomas realized he wanted to build a business that helped men in recovery, and to be generative with his life, the man he called pointed him to Dave. Almost a decade earlier, that man had sent his own son to RAW.
All in
Thomas and Dave kept talking. A year later Thomas was all in, and Melissa and Dave asked him to join RAW as a stakeholder and coach. He became the first voice most men hear when they reach out.
The work of RAW's first era sent it the people who would build the next.
Melissa brought twenty years of study in healing and personal development, a career building curricula and the technology to deliver them and track whether they work, and her own recovery. Together, she and Dave named what they'd both been seeing.
Addiction is a regulation problem before it's a behavior problem. A nervous system finds a way to hold what life demanded, and that strategy works until it doesn't. Remove the strategy without building the capacity, and a man is standing in the same storm with no shelter.
So RAW stopped treating recovery as the finish line and started treating it as the foundation.
Regulate first, then build. Train the body to hold more, then train the skills. Lead yourself without force, and then lead others the same way.
In 2026, all of it came together as The Fortitude Program™: twelve weeks, small groups of men, and the people who built the work in the room with every one of them. That's the RAW we are today.
Three ways in. All of them close to the founders.
We keep RAW small right now on purpose. Every man and every family we work with gets direct time with the people who built the work. That's hard to do at scale, so for this season we're not trying to.
The Fortitude Program™
Twelve weeks for men in recovery who are ready to build, not just maintain. Each man joins a group of eight. Each week he meets with his group in a live Fortitude Circle with Dave and Thomas, works through new lessons in the RAW app or client portal, and keeps a short daily practice.
Along the way he has one-on-one time with all three of us: an orientation with Thomas, a strategy and goals session with Dave (and monthly coaching after that), and a values and vision session with Melissa, with a follow-up in Week 10.
Apply to The Fortitude Program™
Private family clients
For families, and the people around them, when someone they love is in or near early recovery and the situation is complicated. That often means a family business, a family office, or a workplace where the stakes are high and privacy matters.
We set the approach together in a paid evaluation, then work on a monthly retainer. We take five families at a time.
Start with a confidential call
Business mastermind
A private mastermind for men in long-term recovery who run their own businesses. It's small and kept quiet, and most members come in with The Fortitude Program™ behind them. Enquiries go directly to Melissa.
Email MelissaRAW provides recovery coaching, performance coaching, and education. We're not a clinical, medical, or detox service, and we work alongside clinical care, not in place of it.
You'll know every one of us by name.
Dave Alexander
Co-Founder, CEO & Lead CoachDave has spent eighteen years in addiction treatment, and he has built or run programs at almost every stop a man makes on the way through it: detox, mental health, recovery housing, education, alumni.
He founded RAW in 2013 and grew it past 100 beds across Southern California. When a zoning fight came for the houses, he took it to the Ninth Circuit and won a reversal, in a published opinion that strengthened Fair Housing Act and ADA protections for people in recovery.
Then, in 2023, he shut RAW down. For the next three years he worked in dual diagnosis treatment and medical detox, and went through his own somatic and experiential work. What came out the other side was the new RAW, rebuilt with Melissa: neuro-informed performance coaching for men in recovery.
The framework he teaches is one he's been through, not one he read about.
At RAW he leads the weekly Fortitude Circles, sits down one-on-one with every man for strategy and goals, and coaches him monthly through the program.
Melissa Herr
Co-Founder, Chief Development Officer & Attunement SpecialistMelissa has spent twenty years building businesses on the internet, often ahead of her industries. She has launched and grown four startups, among them an independent publishing company, a writing and business coaching company for experts, educators and authors, and a coaching company that took young mixing engineers into top music careers. She also ran business development for an IP firm that was among the first to practice patent law online.
For the past decade she has been an executive coach to more than 100 business owners, and more recently an AI consultant. Her craft is curriculum: designing a program, delivering it, and tracking whether it actually changes anything.
Under all of it has been her own work. As a woman in recovery, she has spent a lifetime in NARM, Somatic Experiencing, Nonviolent Communication, and the study of attachment and child development. RAW is where those two lives finally meet.
Every practice she brings into RAW is one she's used on herself first.
At RAW she built the attunement framework the program runs on. She meets each man to map his values and vision, with a follow-up in Week 10, works directly with private family clients, and leads the business mastermind.
Thomas Orradre
Stakeholder, Head of Client Experience & Assistant CoachThomas comes from a family of entrepreneurs and trailblazers going back generations, and from the world of college athletics. He played wide receiver at the University of Tennessee on a full football scholarship, and came back from a torn ACL to play his senior year.
After Tennessee he went into athletics fundraising and raised tens of millions of dollars for college athletics programs.
He got sober on December 3, 2021, at 25. When he decided to build his life around helping men in recovery, a phone call led him to Dave, and a year of conversations led him all in. He left college athletics to partner with Dave and Melissa, and today he's a stakeholder in RAW.
He knows what it costs to build something, and what it means to rebuild.
At RAW he's usually the first person you'll talk to. He walks every man and family through what fits, runs orientation, and co-leads the Fortitude Circles with Dave.
Read Thomas's storyLoved by many, understood by few.
That's the title Thomas would give his book. Here is part of his story, as he tells it.
"At one point I was put back into my 14-year-old self and my body was gripping the chair. I was able to give that 14-year-old Thomas a hug. When I came back into my body, I felt a relief, and I didn't realize how much I was crying."
That moment came during trauma work in residential treatment. The people in the room said he had left his body, and when he came back, something had been repaired. Not erased. Repaired. The way gold fills a crack.
I was born into chaos. Alcohol was a constant presence in my home, and with it came fear and instability. I learned how to survive by becoming strong on the outside, even while I felt broken on the inside. On the outside I showed laughter, humor, and no fear. I started drinking and using drugs when I was 12, and what started as an escape slowly became a way of life.
Athletics became my refuge. It gave me structure, discipline, and a dream bigger than my circumstances, and eventually a full scholarship to play football at the University of Tennessee. To the outside world, it looked like I had made it. Then I tore my ACL a week before my junior season. Football had been my identity, and when it was taken away, the pain I had buried for years came rushing to the surface. My drinking escalated. I was surviving, but I was not living.
After I graduated, life looked stable on paper. It wasn't. My addiction took me to the edge of my life, and it cost me the sight in my right eye.
On December 3, 2021, I did what I always thought was impossible. I asked for help. Recovery forced me to face every emotion I had spent years trying to outrun. It also gave me something I had never truly experienced before: peace, clarity, hope, and above all, purpose.
Today, my mother and my father are sober too. What once felt impossible has become part of our family's redemption story.
I was searching everywhere for a way into the work of helping others when Dave and Melissa came into my life. It truly was a God-send.
All glory to God, and to the people who walked beside me when I could not walk alone.
The next chapter of this page belongs to the men in it.
The men in our first Fortitude Program™ groups are in the work right now. With their permission, we're gathering their stories in their own words, through the twelve weeks and in the months after. What changed. What was hard. What they can hold now that they couldn't before. We'll share them here as they're ready, and not before.
Growing carefully, with the founders in the room.
In 2027 we'll open more groups and bring men together in person for the first time at Fortitude Live, our retreat at Refugio in Fallbrook, California, beginning in February. We'll grow carefully. Whatever size RAW becomes, the founders stay in the room.
