Jon Dance finds joy in building community, removing stigmas

When he graduates with his Master of Public Health in May, Jon Dance will complete a journey that he never envisioned.

After a 23-year hiatus, he returned to Virginia Tech in January 2021 to finish his undergraduate degree in human development, which he accomplished in 2023. He had enrolled in the public health program's accelerated master's degree while still an undergraduate with a concentration on community health, promotion, and equity, which he will finish this semester.

For Dance, 47, returning to higher education was a life-saver. For decades, he battled mental wellness. After being diagnosed with attention‐deficit disorder, he realized his earlier struggles made sense: He was self-medicating with alcohol and drugs. Dance said that route caught up with him and the last few years of his food-service career ended in his first trip to treatment.

Over the next few years, Dance was in and out of treatment three times. When he entered treatment in September 2020, he said he knew it was his last chance. “I knew if I didn’t start doing everything differently, I was going to die,” he said.

Retraining his brain

When he got out of treatment, he was determined to do things differently. He searched online for “how to retrain your brain" and said that was the beginning of his journey. For the past 3 1/2 years, he has been focused on that effort, and “most of my journey has been about unlearning old information, false information, biases, etc.”

After treatment, he also explored a return to college. A friend helped with the admissions process at Virginia Tech, and he learned that he had completed 60 credit hours a few decades before. He said he could not believe they existed, as he believed he had “flunked out,” when he was younger. He chose to return to Virginia Tech because of his love for the school through athletics and the support he received from the Virginia Tech Recovery Community.

Matthew Komelski, advanced instructor of human development, said Dance returned to higher education with a sense of determination and a mission. “It was clear he had been through some challenges and wanted to help other students avoid pitfalls and meet their challenges.”

Komelski said that as a graduate assistant, Dance has been instrumental in building the Mind-Body Flow senior capstone program. “It is a collaboration with Hokie Wellness that gives seniors a chance to plan, peer-facilitate, and evaluate a mindfulness-based wellness program for students across campus.”

Service alongside learning

Komelski said Dance’s time at Virginia Tech has been as much about service as it has been about learning and fulfilling degree requirements. Dance has worked with New River Valley Community Services as a direct service provider and with Hokie Wellness as a recovery outreach specialist and recovery community coordinator.

His latest venture is co-chairing the 15-year-old Montgomery County Prevention Partners Coalition with Alexis Isaac. The program is “committed to the collective wellness of our community.” In a recent newsletter, Dance and Isaac wrote: “Our mission is clear: to bring about healing, foster connection, and dismantle barriers of stigma and shame associated with substance use disorder, mental health, and seeking help.”

Isaac, a mental health counselor at Mount Regis Center and a doctoral student in the counselor education and supervision program at Virginia Tech, said she vividly remembers when she first met Dance. Not only was he friendly and welcoming, he carried a water bottle that she described as “a canvas of recovery, mental health, and advocacy stickers.”

Eliminating shame and building relationships

Dance is passionate about building community and busting stigmas, especially those directed toward people battling substance use disorder, living with mental health struggles, actively in treatment, or seeking help. “We keep using these terms to shame people, he said. Through his role as co-chair of the coalition, Dance hopes to heal individuals and community while also eliminating those negative stigmas.

Isaac said Dance’s honesty and welcoming demeanor shines through his work with colleagues, members of the recovery community, and those who are served by the Montgomery County Prevention Partners Coalition. “I’ve observed his candor and authenticity as refreshing to folks we work with and a window into building long-lasting relationships with Jon,” she said.

Dance said people in treatment span a wide range of ages, backgrounds, and occupations — not to mention family relationships and roles. “It was the greatest and most eye-opening experience for me to realize these people are just like me,” he said. He now “accepts everybody for who they are.”

Isaac agrees with that. “Jon is the most dedicated person I have worked with regarding substance use recovery and mental wellness. His passion is contagious, and he ignites any space he enters.”

Helping people find the Flow Zone

His work as a recovery community coordinator and champion has been to find ways to bring people together, to create a space that feels welcoming for all who enter it and fosters building relationships.

Dance said one unusual and undeniably successful tool for fulfilling that aim has been the Virginia Tech Recovery Community’s coffee bike. The three-wheeled vehicle carries a hot water heater, a coffee grinder, and a collection of mugs and offers free cups of pour-over coffee to those who flock to it. The bike and its barista also provide opportunities to discuss recovery and foster community.

The bike reminded Dance of how people can find comfort and a sense of belonging in spaces that also provide food and beverages. “I’m a chef by trade,” he said, noting his background in the restaurant industry. “So I’m familiar with the sense of community a restaurant can provide.”

As much as he loves what the coffee bicycle helps accomplish, Dance has been thinking of other ways to use the support the goals with other kinds of vehicles. He has taken the concepts of the Community Resiliency Model and mindfulness and melded them into the idea of a Flow Zone, a space between the highs and lows of daily life. Erica Coates, assistant director of partnership initiatives and a licensed clinical social worker with Cook Counseling Services, said Dance quickly grasped the usefulness and importance of the Community Resiliency Model (CRM).

“Jon jumped in from the ground floor,” she said. “His creative fingerprints are everywhere within our CRM infusion on our campus.” 

Melding a bike, a model, and a zone

Coates said the Community Resiliency Model is about simple language and tools one can share with friends, roommates, family, bosses, even casual acquaintances to help dial back survival responses of High Zone activation, the fight, flight, or friend mode of response, and Low Zone, or freeze mode, activation.

“We hope CRM helps us be more often in our 'Flow Zone,' where we take things as they come and can keep rolling, and help us help others. Jon has translated this science into his work on the CRM bike.”

Using the coffee bike as a model, Dance’s master’s degree project has been to build on the Community Resiliency Model and the Flow Zone. To that end, he took a cargo bike to industrial design Associate Professor Martha Sullivan and her design team, asking them to build a bicycle that provides sensory experiences.

“They fitted the bike with a cooler on the back that has hot and cold sensory cups. There is a garden box on two sides. Students can garden on the back of the bike,” he said. The project has sparked other ideas — perhaps a bike with carnival games.

“Jon is so unique because he can visualize a world where people are real with each other, and real with themselves, to take care their well-being in however that looks for them,” Coates said.

“Everything he touches”

Dance plans to stay in the New River Valley area after graduating. “I’m going to continue advocating and supporting the NRV and VT communities,” he said, adding that he and his wife of 14 years are in the best place they’ve ever been.

“Sharing my story has been the most empowering thing I have ever done and I saw the impact it has had on the community, so I will continue to share, support, and advocate for the NRV and VT communities with plans to bridge gaps in services, build relationships, and connect folks to the right supports and resources.”

Coates and the people Dance has worked closely with for the past several years have no doubt he will be successful.

“Jon is so unique because he can visualize a world where people are real with each other, and real with themselves, to take care their well-being in however that looks for them,” Coates said. "He is passionate about bringing our current world a bit closer to the one he envisions and his energy towards learning and constantly opening oneself up is infectious. Everything he touches, he makes better.”