For 13 years, prosecutors say, Clarise Blanchard quietly rerouted donations intended for StarVista — the San Mateo County mental-health nonprofit where she kept the books — into an account she alone controlled. On Aug. 13, a judge ordered the 79-year-old to six months in county jail. But the organization she robbed shut down last summer, and even the district attorney admits it's now unclear who is supposed to collect the money she owes.

Blanchard was once celebrated on the Peninsula: the county's 2008 Woman of the Year, honored by the Commission on the Status of Women for helping vulnerable women through substance-abuse and mental-health struggles. Her sentencing this month ends the criminal case against her, but it also exposes a quiet gap in how the system handles restitution when a nonprofit victim dies before its embezzler is punished. StarVista dissolved in 2025 — for reasons prosecutors insist had nothing to do with the theft — leaving a court order to repay a charity that is no longer there to be repaid.

Kevin Dunleavy, a judge on the San Mateo County Superior Court, sentenced Blanchard, of Foster City, on Aug. 13 to six months in county jail as a condition of two years' probation, along with 250 hours of community service and a permanent bar on holding any financial or fiduciary role, according to the District Attorney's Office as reported by SFGATE. She remains out of custody and was ordered to report to jail by Oct. 17.

The term landed between two irreconcilable requests. Prosecutors sought three years and four months in state prison; the defense asked for probation and no jail. Dunleavy had tipped his hand weeks earlier, telling the court in July that he would not impose a prison term but might order up to a year behind bars locally, the Palo Alto Daily Post reported. The judge cited Blanchard's acknowledgment that what she did was wrong as a point in her favor. In an unusual twist, StarVista's own former chief executive, Sara Larios Mitchell, urged the court to grant probation and require a public apology rather than lock Blanchard up, District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe told the Post.

The scheme was methodical. Blanchard was employed at StarVista — a Burlingame-based nonprofit that ran crisis lines, counseling and behavioral-health contracts across San Mateo County — from 2002 until she retired in 2022, eventually as clinical director. Starting around 2009, prosecutors say, she opened a bank account in her own name, funneled donor contributions into it, and papered over the gap by sending contributors thank-you letters signed with a forged version of a StarVista executive's signature. The fraud went undetected until after she left, when an expected major gift never reached the nonprofit's accounts and triggered an audit.

Through most of the case the loss was described as roughly $700,000, the figure the DA used across plea talks. At sentencing it grew: prosecutors placed the restitution owed at $813,000, split among StarVista and state and federal tax authorities — a reflection that Blanchard never paid taxes on what she took. In October 2025 she pleaded no contest to felony counts that included identity theft, money laundering and failure to file income tax returns, a bargain that capped her maximum exposure at three years and four months.

Then comes the part no sentence resolves: who actually gets paid. StarVista — at its peak a roughly 200-employee organization reporting more than $16 million in annual revenue — announced in July 2025↗ (external source, opens in a new tab) that it would close on Aug. 1, blaming "financial challenges" and a collapsed merger. "We are heartbroken to share this news," acting CEO Shareen Leland said at the time. Prosecutors have been careful to note the closure was not caused by the embezzlement; the group was already running an operating deficit before the theft came to light. But the dissolution scrambles the restitution order. Wagstaffe acknowledged it was not immediately clear to whom Blanchard's payments would flow now that the nonprofit is gone, and said he did not know whether the money might instead go to StarVista's creditors.

The result is a repayment order pointed at a victim that no longer exists — a structural blind spot that will recur every time a small nonprofit folds while a fraud case inches through the courts. And for a scheme that ran more than a decade, Blanchard faces a jail stay measured in months: an outcome that lit up local comment threads with anger but is consistent with how California courts routinely treat elderly, first-time white-collar defendants who take a plea.