PRINCIPLE | COUNSELOR | COACH | FOUNDER

Dave Alexander didn’t study recovery from the outside. He built it from the inside — bed by bed, system by system, life by life.

Dave founded RAW Recovery & Wellness and grew it to over 100 beds across multiple residences, creating the infrastructure that carried people from detox through treatment and into stable housing, employment, and long-term recovery. He has trained more than 100 recovery coaches through the CCAR peer coaching model, delivered over 500 lectures on recovery principles to patients, alumni, and families, and currently serves as Director of Client Care at Saddleback Detox, where he oversees medical detox and early recovery stabilization daily.

Along the way, RAW became the subject of federal litigation that reached the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit — a landmark case that clarified disability protections for recovery housing under the Fair Housing Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act. Dave didn’t just weather that fight. He came out of it with a deeper conviction about ethical recovery housing, sound policy, and the responsibility that comes with doing this work at scale.

But Dave’s vision never stopped at sobriety. Together with Melissa Herr, he created Men of Fortitude — a program built on a conviction most of the recovery industry ignores: that getting sober is the starting line, not the finish. Men of Fortitude and the emotional fortitude programs that grew from it help men who are already in recovery step into something far bigger — leadership, prosperity, relational depth, and a version of their life they couldn’t have imagined when they were just trying to stay clean. Men walk in stable. They walk out transformed.

Now, Dave has brought RAW into its modern expression — a full-spectrum platform for men in recovery built on structure, accountability, and the long game of not just rebuilding a life, but building one that exceeds what came before.

He is widely respected and consistently referred to across the recovery industry — a leader of leaders, trusted by clinicians, program directors, and families alike. He is the person who can look at your loved one’s situation and tell you — honestly, specifically, without hedging — what needs to happen, in what order, and why. Not because he read about it. Because he has spent twenty years building the systems that make it work, walking alongside the people inside them, and learning what actually holds when everything else falls apart.

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