Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute Mobile Mental Wellness Collaborative CEO Talli Dolge poses for a portrait outside of her home in Alamo Heights on Monday. (Kaylee Greenlee Beal/Contributor)
During her childhood on Long Island, Talli Dolge suffered from migraines powerful enough to bring on panic attacks. At 10, she was diagnosed with a panic disorder.
Her mental health struggles intensified through her teen years. In her senior year of high school, she couldn’t bring herself to leave her family’s home for six months, leading to another diagnosis, of agoraphobia. For a while, she battled suicidal thoughts.
The same person who once could not step outside her home is now one of the leading advocates for mental wellness in San Antonio, giving speeches and writing essays in which she opens up about her past and offers advice to others struggling with anxiety.
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Her greatest impact comes through the San Antonio Mobile Mental Wellness Collaborative, a partnership she formed in 2019. The collaborative coordinates the efforts of local nonprofits in order to provide free counseling and other mental health services to students in five local school districts, as well as to their families and the districts’ teachers and administrators.
While growing up has always been hard, today’s children and teenagers have to grapple with new sources of anxiety: the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic and the high-pressure world of social media, to name a few. Meanwhile, there is a lack of mental health resources in many parts of San Antonio, especially in low-income neighborhoods on the South, East and West Sides.
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Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute Mobile Mental Wellness Collaborative CEO Talli Dolge poses for a portrait outside of her home in Alamo Heights on Monday. (Kaylee Greenlee Beal/Contributor)
Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute Mobile Mental Wellness Collaborative CEO Talli Dolge poses for a portrait outside of her home in Alamo Heights on Monday. (Kaylee Greenlee Beal/Contributor)
Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute Mobile Mental Wellness Collaborative CEO Talli Dolge poses for a portrait outside of her home in Alamo Heights on Monday. (Kaylee Greenlee Beal/Contributor)
Through the mental wellness collaborative, Dolge is setting out to change that. Far from adding to her own anxiety, she finds the work therapeutic.
“Part of living with a mental illness has been living in hiding and in shame and in isolation for a lot of my life,” she said. “When I decided to go a little bit more on the public platform, it has helped me immensely knowing that first of all, I’m not alone in this process, and also that I’m able to affect change in the way somebody else may look at having a mental illness.”
Five nonprofits offer services through the partnership: the Children’s Bereavement Center of South Texas, helping those grieving the loss of a loved one; Rise Recovery, with a focus on substance abuse; the Clarity Child Guidance Center, providing counseling to children and their families, with an in-patient unit; Joven, a youth organization; and Family Service, helping families overcome challenges, whether financial, educational or behavioral.
Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute Mobile Mental Wellness Collaborative CEO Talli Dolge poses for a portrait outside of her home in Alamo Heights on Monday. (Kaylee Greenlee Beal/Contributor)
The partnership, which now operates under the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute, has grown fast in the three years since it formed, thanks to the support of donors such as the H.E. Butt Foundation and Methodist Healthcare Ministries of South Texas.
In its first school year, 2019-2020, it operated only in South San Antonio Independent School District, reaching about 1,700 people, Dolge said. Since then, it has spread into the districts for Harlandale, Edgewood, San Antonio and Judson. In the most recent school year, nearly 8,200 people made use of its services, she said.
“It could never have been done by one organization alone,” she said. “The biggest message is the collaborative effort. There is no way that one of us could have done this work.”
Marian Sokol, the executive director of the Children’s Bereavement Center, praised Dolge for her persistence and for working to reduce the stigma of mental illness.
“It’s been more difficult than any of us could have imagined, in part because in San Antonio, you’re not dealing with a single school district, you’re dealing with many school districts. Each has their unique needs, their unique processes,” she said of the partnership. “The need is enormous, but resources are not. The optimism she has and the persistence that she has and the drive is impressive.”
During the worst months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dolge gave speeches over Zoom about living with a mental illness. Meanwhile, the pandemic sparked a relapse of the anxiety disorder she’s suffered from all her life.
“I was talking about living with a mental illness, and at the same time hiding a piece of myself — having a hard time getting out of bed in the morning, having a hard time even brushing my teeth on certain days,” she said.
In December of last year, she wrote an essay for KSAT in which she described how she “ate and drank my way into a major depression and severe anxiety” during the pandemic.
The decision to be more “vulnerable” about her ongoing struggles has changed her life, she said.
“Even though I had been talking about it, that was the first moment that I didn’t feel like I was hiding anymore,” she said of the essay. “I didn’t have to feel the shame and the guilt of continuing to live in the shadows.”
She points to her senior-year battle with agoraphobia as the reason she pursued a career in the mental health sector. Her high school had “good intentions,” she said, but it didn’t have the resources to help someone battling such a severe illness.
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Yet her career took a few detours before she made it to the mental health field.
After earning a bachelor’s in drama therapy and a master’s in education and counseling from the State University of New York at Brockport, she took a job with Disney selling resort properties; she would work on and off for the company for nine years. The job helped give her an “entrepreneurial spirit,” she said, teaching her “how to sell things and how to raise money and work with some of the largest organizations and corporations in the world.”
She later worked for Hilton Worldwide before coming to San Antonio to serve as senior director of marketing, branding and sales for the Witte Museum.
Meanwhile, she worked with a therapist who helped her “retrain her thoughts,” she said.
“She works with me on such an open basis that there is no judgment, no matter what I do, no matter what old habits I go back to,” she said. “I’m going to say that therapy is the thing that has been the most constant in my life — probably one of the biggest things that if I did not keep up with it, I’m not sure where I would be.”
She had always preserved an interest in advocacy for mental health — for a while she hosted a mental health podcast named Dearest Oprah.
During her time at the Witte, she realized she wanted to take her career in a new direction, with more of a focus on mental health. In 2018, she took a position as CEO of the Jewish Family Service of San Antonio, a nonprofit with a focus on mental health that serves people of all faiths throughout the community.
Dolge said she had the idea for the partnership when she saw a photograph of students at South San Antonio ISD holding signs asking for more mental health resources within the district.
At that time, the district had only one social worker for 9,000 students, she said.
She brought together the leaders of local mental health nonprofits to discuss combining their efforts to bring a “comprehensive mental health and wellness program” into local schools. From the start, she knew she wanted the services to be available not only to students but their family members and school employees.
“This could not be just about the students,” she said. In her youthful struggles with mental illness, “it was my family who was suffering as well.”
The partnership launched a pilot program in South San ISD in 2019. Before long, other school districts were approaching the partnership asking whether it could offer such services to their own students. One of those was Harlandale.
“We found out about South San ISD, and we were really interested,” said Brian Jaklich, the district’s social work coordinator. “Her passion for this was so inspiring.”
The partnership operates differently in each district based on its resources and needs. It is funded almost entirely through grants from charities, foundations, the city and the federal government, with school districts picking up a small share of the cost — for Harlandale ISD the cost is “minimal,” Jaklich said.
In November 2020, the partnership helped Harlandale ISD to open the Harlandale Care Center off of South Flores Street. There, students and their families — and even members of the community who don’t have children in the district — can access free counseling through the partnership. Employees of the nonprofits also visit students on school campuses.
The care center has been a great resource, helping to reduce the stigma of mental illness in the district at a time when current events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, school shootings and the rising cost of living are creating stress for families, Jaklich said.
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“A lot of times, families just don’t have access to services, because of transportation or because of the lack of services in this area on the South Side,” he said.
He said he considered Dolge to be “kind of like a mentor.”
“In all honesty, I adore her,” he said. “She is a person that when you talk with her, she’s so energetic, she’s so passionate about making sure these programs work. She is so accessible — if you need anything, just call her. She’s always super-positive.”
At the beginning of this year, the partnership moved from Jewish Family Service to operate under the umbrella of the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute, a mental health nonprofit headquartered in Dallas that provides services across the state.
“It became too big for one organization; that was really the challenge,” Dolge said of the shift.
She now hopes to expand its offerings to more school districts and to do more outreach to educate people about mental illness.
The goal is for the partnership to act as more of a “prevention program” than a “crisis program,” she said, keeping people from descending into a mental health crisis by teaching them different ways of coping. Our society has made great strides in its awareness of mental health, she said, but there is still a long way to go.
“We’re talking about anxiety, depression, isolation — things that we did not see so many years ago as a piece of our life,” she said.
Yet with the proliferation of smartphones and other stressors, “we are seeing this huge uptick in anxiety-related mental health challenges right now, on a level that I don’t think we’ve prepared ourselves for.”
Richard Webner is a freelance business writer and former real estate reporter for the Express-News. He earned a graduate degree in journalism from the University of Missouri and an undergraduate degree in History from Northwestern University.

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