The podcast Guiding Growth: Conversations with Community Leaders from the Gilbert Chamber of Commerce, event and meeting venue Modern Moments and the Gilbert Independent/yourvalley.net explores the human journey of leaders. There are stories of humility, triumph, roadblocks, and lessons learned. This partial transcript of the most recent podcast with Tony and Melody Rodarte has been edited for brevity and clarity.   

Tony Rodarte retired from the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office in 2008 with 20 years of service in Arizona. He spent his last 11 years in their Homicide Unit. Tony also spent time with the AZ statewide child abduction task force. Tony spent most of his career in investigations between district detectives, IA, Jail Crimes, and Homicide.  
 
Dr. Melody Rodarte has been a physician for 18 years. She is double board in obesity medicine and internal medicine. She is passionate about whole-person care, especially for first responders who have suffered from trauma. Melody has a private practice in Gilbert, Arizona. Following Tony’s retirement from MCSO, the two founded Compassion Alliance, a non-profit organization focused on shedding light on the needs of first responders and with the goal of changing the stigma associated with asking for help. Through Compassion Alliance, they support and advocate for first responders, retirees, and their spouses throughout the country. 

How do you end up meeting each other?  

Tony: Melody and I met at church through a college group at a time when we were both kind of busy and, and really not looking for each other. We stumbled upon each other and, like Melody said, the rest is history.  

Melody: It was kind of fun because neither of us were looking for a relationship. So, everybody around us was like, you guys should date. We're like, no. For me, I had blinders on, I'm like, ‘I'm going to med school. I can't have anybody get in my way.’ All of a sudden we were like, ‘Hh, maybe we do a lot together, maybe we should date.’ 

How did you keep that going? You hardly saw each other. You both have stressful jobs and things. I mean, what's the secret there?  

Tony: I don't know what that secret sauce is other than just being brutally honest and open, like there was never a topic or a conversation that was taboo for Melody and I, and there were some uncomfortable conversations that we had. 

The career path I chose grossly impacted our marriage, and we're standing before you married for 26 years now because of her, not because of me. There were some really rough times with my call schedule and just the underbelly of the world that I was dealing with in a homicide unit where I, if it was up to me, I would have totally just checked out. Um, and she's like, “no, that's like, not an option.” 

Melody: I think one of the things that really Tony and I agreed to and it's just because our church made us do premarital counseling and then we had to do counseling at one-year anniversary and have mentors. And I think that really made a huge difference because you had a neutral person to bring you together to have these hard conversations and to figure this out. 

Let's talk about this nonprofit. How did it come about and what's it doing?  

Tony: When I retired, Melody and I started a nonprofit where we pay for trauma therapy for police fire and EMS, and we just do it quietly. And it all kind of came out of my story. So the tail end of my career, I knew that I needed some help. 

I elected to retire basically at the stroke of midnight on my 20th year. and I rode off quietly and I went and got help and that's where my mental health journey began. And I realized very quickly I wasn't nearly as broken as I thought I was. I thought I was damaged goods. I didn't think my marriage was fixable. I didn't think my mental health was fixable, and I found out super quickly that it totally was. And so that's really what started our nonprofit is advocating for these first responders and giving them a safe place to reach out where they don't have to go to their employer or a supervisor. 

And what we thought was just going to be a handful of local guys we'd be helping out has just morphed and grown into something far greater than that. We help folks all over the country. I don't think we anticipated it would grow at this rate or that quickly, but it just tells you the problem.  

And so that's, that's what we've created. It was created out of my story that darkest place in my career when I needed help. I didn't know who to reach out to. I wasn't aware of a Compassion Alliance or a nonprofit like that. And so I shouldered all of this, and that's what we're trying to prevent. I want guys to get help now and prolong their career. Don't retire at the stroke of midnight on their 20th year if you don't have to, prolong that. 

How do they find out about this? 

Tony: We help men and women all over the country. But we run it right out of our medical practice here in Gilbert. So we run it out of the same building. A lot of the work we do is word of mouth. So we help guys, they realize we're a safe place. So they tell people they work with. And we see it happen in different agencies. 

So it'll start oftentimes with the fire department in a community and then they'll share it with the police department because they have close bonds and then they reach out. And you never know where it's going to be or where the next request is going to come. We get them from all over the place. It's very random. But we also help out spouses, spouses and retirees. But I will tell you spouses are a special place in our heart. We want to do everything we can for these first responder marriages. 

They're under a lot of stress, and our divorce rates are higher than the general public. And so Melody and I are really leaning into those spouses. And we do a ton of marriage counseling.