M. ALEX VON KESSLER

Alex brings a combination of personal connection, professional experience, and strategic thinking to UNITY. A longtime advocate for equity, inclusion, and dignity, he founded the organization after years of supporting causes centered on housing, stability, and people with complex, long-term needs.

For Alex, the mission is also personal. Growing up with a brother who has intellectual and developmental disabilities gave him an early view of the gaps families encounter and how exhausting it can be to navigate systems that were supposedly built to help. It also gave him a lasting conviction that people deserve better options and that families should not have to fight quite so hard to find them.

His involvement began early. While still in high school, Alex enrolled in a college-level early childhood education program and gravitated toward working with students others often considered “too difficult.” That instinct to meet people where they are later carried into broader advocacy, including work in school transportation where he pushed for students with special needs to receive equitable, respectful access to essential services.

His focus later expanded to transitional housing and support services, working with people facing overlapping and often complicated challenges. Through it all, his philosophy has remained fairly simple: practical compassion matters, dignity matters, and lasting stability usually requires looking at the whole person rather than one problem at a time.

Professionally, Alex brings decades of experience as a business owner and entrepreneur, with ventures in the United States and abroad. That work has given him extensive experience in operations, sustainability, problem-solving, and strategic planning. He brings those same skills to UNITY with a focus on building something durable enough to serve people well for years to come.

UNITY is a young organization, but the work behind it is not new to him. Alex has spent years supporting and helping fund efforts serving vulnerable populations and strengthening community stability. With UNITY, he brings those experiences together in one place, combining a personal investment in the mission with the business acumen needed to help it grow responsibly.

DAGNY LORD

Dagny brings decades of care, advocacy, adaptability, and good old-fashioned steadiness to UNITY. As the eldest of six children, she learned early how to look after people, solve problems, and keep moving when things get complicated. Those qualities eventually led her into nursing, a profession she has practiced with skill and dedication for decades.

Her life and career have taken her to communities around the world, giving her an unusually broad perspective on people, culture, and the many different ways families live and care for one another. Nursing added another layer to that experience. Working in demanding environments taught her to stay calm, think clearly, and make sound decisions when circumstances are anything but simple.

After moving to the Olympic Peninsula in the early 1990s, Dagny began providing in-home care for medically fragile children. Through that work she met Katie, first caring for her professionally, then fostering her, and ultimately adopting her. That journey brought Dagny face-to-face with the medical, foster care, educational, and housing systems, often all at once, while advocating for a child with complex needs.

Those experiences turned concern into action. Dagny has supported numerous efforts serving people with special needs and has previously founded a nonprofit herself. She understands that gaps in services are not abstract policy problems. They affect real people, real families, and very often the most ordinary parts of everyday life.

Dagny brings to UNITY a global perspective, practical experience, and a quiet but formidable resolve. She listens carefully, adapts quickly, and is not easily rattled. Most importantly, she understands that good intentions only go so far. Meaningful change takes persistence, sound judgment, and people willing to keep showing up.

LORI RICHARDSON

Lori brings something to UNITY that cannot be learned from a manual: more than 30 years of lived experience navigating the world of intellectual and developmental disabilities as a parent, advocate, and community member.

As the mother of an adult son with an intellectual disability, Lori has spent decades working through education, care systems, community services, and all of the bureaucracy that tends to come with them. She knows both the good these systems can accomplish and the frustration families experience when they fall short. Her commitment to the IDD community is not theoretical. It has been part of her everyday life for more than three decades.

Professionally, Lori has served as a house manager in a shared-living home, giving her firsthand experience with the daily realities of creating an environment that is safe, structured, respectful, and genuinely comfortable for the people who live there. She has also served on the board of a similar organization, bringing that practical perspective into governance and decision-making.

One of Lori’s proudest accomplishments came during her son’s school years. Through a combination of community advocacy and insurance funding, she helped overhaul and modernize the district’s special-needs curriculum and resources. What began as advocacy for her own child ultimately improved access for many students who came after him. It is a fitting example of Lori’s general approach: if something is not working, she is unlikely to quietly accept that answer.

Lori brings that same tenacity to UNITY. She is direct, perceptive, and refreshingly unfiltered. She has little patience for unnecessary red tape and even less for losing sight of the people a system is supposed to serve. That candor makes her an important voice on the board and, occasionally, the person willing to say what everyone else in the room is thinking.

Whether she is challenging an outdated practice or helping make the road a little easier for the next family, Lori brings courage, experience, and an unmistakably practical form of advocacy to UNITY.

Dorine Hunter

Dorine brings to UNITY more than three decades of lived experience, caregiving, and advocacy within the Port Angeles community. A caregiver since the age of 19 and the mother of two adult daughters with intellectual and developmental disabilities, she has spent much of her life navigating the systems, services, and uncertainties that families supporting people with extended needs know all too well.

For Dorine, the need for long-term stability is deeply personal. Following the sudden loss of her husband in 2013, questions many families carry quietly became much more immediate. What happens when one parent is gone? What happens when the remaining parent becomes ill, grows older, or is no longer able to hold everything together? And ultimately, what happens when neither parent is there anymore?

Those questions naturally led to a larger one. What happens to people whose families can no longer provide housing or coordinate their support, but who do not need to be institutionalized or placed in a traditional group-home setting? Dorine believes losing a parent should not automatically mean losing a home, a neighborhood, familiar routines, or the life someone already knows.

That concern extends far beyond her own daughters. It has become one of the central forces behind her advocacy and her vision for what sustainable housing can become. She believes communities need durable ways to preserve housing and continuity long after parents and caregivers are gone, including circumstances where a family has few or no resources of its own.

Dorine also sees tremendous potential in helping families plan ahead when they do have resources to leave behind. Her vision includes finding responsible ways for homes, land, or other assets dedicated to the benefit of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities to remain useful for that purpose. In some cases, that could mean bringing an existing home into a broader housing portfolio so the person living there does not have to leave simply because the family member who managed everything is gone. In others, it could mean coordinating with trusts, families, fiduciaries, or community partners so property and resources continue serving the people they were intended to benefit.

That is a longer-term vision, and one Dorine knows requires careful planning, strong safeguards, and the right structure. But the principle behind it is straightforward: continuity should not depend entirely on one aging parent being there forever.

Dorine brings years of firsthand advocacy through periods of changing services, shrinking resources, and persistent gaps in support. Rather than simply accepting those gaps, she works alongside other families and community members to create alternatives. She is a founding member of a local caregiver cooperative that has served the Port Angeles area for several years, helping build practical support from the ground up when existing systems have not been enough.

Her background also includes helping establish a previous housing nonprofit, an organization she once took tremendous pride in. Over time, she watched it move away from the goals and person-centered approach that originally drew her to the work. The experience was painful and made her understandably cautious about becoming involved with another organization.

UNITY gave her a reason to try again.

Dorine joined because she saw people coming together around a genuine need in the community and a commitment to creating housing around the individual, rather than expecting the individual to conform to a system. She also saw room for a bigger conversation about permanence, stewardship, and how communities can help protect stability when families are no longer able to do it alone.

Today, Dorine brings optimism tempered by hard-earned experience. She understands what families are facing because she lives it, and she understands that the real measure of sustainable housing is whether it can endure beyond the people currently holding all the pieces together. Her persistence, candor, and long-range perspective help keep UNITY focused not only on where people can live today, but on how they can remain secure, connected, and at home well into the future.

Carolynn brock

Carolynn brings to UNITY an unusually broad range of community and human-services experience, along with a strong commitment to making sure people have somewhere safe, stable, and welcoming to call home.

Her background includes special-needs services, crisis prevention and intervention, special education, nonprofit healthcare, and behavioral education. She is also a former Certified Nursing Assistant and former business owner. That variety has given her a practical understanding of how many different systems can touch one person’s life, and how bewildering those systems can become when families are forced to navigate several of them at once.

Carolynn believes housing should provide more than shelter. A home should offer stability, belonging, independence, and a place within the community. She is particularly passionate about expanding opportunities for people with disabilities and others who can struggle to find housing that is both appropriate for their needs and somewhere they genuinely want to live.

Her experience in crisis prevention gives her another perspective that fits naturally with UNITY’s work. Problems are often easier to address before they become crises, and the right environment, support, and sense of security can make an enormous difference. For Carolynn, that means looking beyond immediate needs and helping create conditions where people have a real opportunity to thrive.

As a member of UNITY’s board, Carolynn brings a thoughtful, community-minded voice and a strong belief that the people served by an organization should never become an afterthought within it. She wants the people living in UNITY homes to feel welcomed, included, valued, and considered in the decisions that affect their lives.

Carolynn joins the board ready to work alongside residents, families, community partners, and her fellow board members as UNITY continues to grow. Her breadth of experience, pragmatic perspective, and genuine belief in belonging add another valuable voice to the organization and the community it serves.