Victoria Cherry Cousins ’79

Victoria Cherry Cousins ’79 died on June 28, 2005, in Columbia, South Carolina.

Born on February 25, 1957, in Bangor, she prepared for college at Bangor High School and during her junior year at Bowdoin studied at Warnborough College in Oxford, England. Following her graduation in 1979, she lived in St. Louis, MO, and sold advertising for a magazine there, Missouri Life. In 1981, she became a sales representative with the St. Louis Business Journal, and she became director of sales with Design Network, Inc., also in St. Louis, in 1989. She later moved to Columbia, where she became the first Director of Consumer Affairs for the South Carolina Department of Mental Health. She was active in several national mental health organizations and contributed to a number of federal policy-making initiatives and research projects relating to mental health. She was the founder and co-chair of the South Carolina Mental Health Department’s Trauma Initiative Task Force and co-director of the Palmetto Pride Consumer Recovery Leadership Retreat. She was also the founder of the department’s Consumer-to-Consumer Evaluation Team, through which mental health service recipients could evaluate health services. Surviving are her mother, Harriette Cousins of Bangor, and a brother, Douglas Cousins of Brewer.