Jason Renaud – Background

Jason Renaud

Jason Renaud is a nonprofit consultant focusing on program design and leadership. He’s a well-known public speaker and writer on recovery from alcoholism and the experience of people with mental illness, and is an active advocate for people who have fallen through the public safety net. Renaud has over 37 years of open recovery from alcoholism. 

He is the board secretary of the Mental Health Association of Portland and is the organization’s voluntary managing director. He coordinates four enduring projects for the organization; the Law & Mental Health Conference – in 2022 on Civil Commitment; the Mental Health Alliance which advises courts and government agencies on police reform in relation to mental illness and addiction; the Alternative Mobile Service Association, which connects city and county leaders creating alternatives to police.

Renaud spent fifteen years as an executive team member of the national nonprofit healthcare advocate Compassion & Choices, working on multi-million dollar fundraising campaigns, successful state ballot measures, legislative, public relations and legal battles, and development of both the medical and pharmaceutical practice of aid in dying. As executive director of their Oregon affiliate, he coordinated in-home patient care for Oregon’s aid in dying services and was at the bedside for over forty deaths.

Renaud has held managerial positions for several diverse organizations, including executive positions for the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, the Washington State Department of Corrections, The Oregonian newspaper, Central City Concern – where he managed alcohol and drug free housing, and Cascadia Behavioral Healthcare – where he was both communications director and the ACT Team coordinator – not at the same time.

In 2010 he ran for Portland City Council on a police reform platform. In 2014 Renaud produced the award-winning documentary film Alien Boy: The Life and Death of James Chasse. He has been amicus curiae to US DOJ v City of Portland since 2018. He is a former Crisis Intervention Team trainer, and a community engagement trainer for the Oregon Department of Public Safety Standards and Training. Currently he serves on the board of the Lone Fir Cemetery Foundation, Multnomah County’s Transforming Justice Steering Committee, and on Portland’s Police Accountability Commission, and was an advisor to the TRANSFORM911 Project at the University of Chicago Health Lab in 2022.

Contact Jason Renaud
info @ mentalhealthportland.org
503-367-6128 – PO Box 3641 Portland, Oregon 97208
www.linkedin.com/in/jasonrenaud – Twitter @renaud_pdx