Helping to Keep Families off the Streets

According to Strategies to End Homelessness, in 2024, 6,489 people experienced homelessness in Hamilton County. Of those, 22% were children under the age of 18.

To address the issue, Strategies to End Homelessness teamed up with Greater Cincinnati Behavioral Health Services (GCBHS) to launch a pilot program through the Central Access Point Helpline or CAP Line. The goal is to identify families in desperate need of housing, due to the limited number of family shelter beds being available. “The partnership between the CAP Line and GCBHS”, says Amanda Mayborg, Coordinated Access Manager at Strategies to End Homelessness, “plays an important role in reaching families at the point of crisis. This collaboration helps improve engagement and verification, allowing families with children to be identified and connected to shelter more efficiently.”

The program works by having families call 513-381-SAFE (7233) for help. They let the CAP Line operators know they are unhoused and have children. CAP records information about location, etc. and shares that with GCBHS outreach workers who go into the community weekday mornings and actively attempt to locate and verify that these families are indeed without shelter. Associate VP of Mental Health Services, Katherine Unterreiner says, over the course of the past year the two organizations have, “better coordinated the use of systems, which has improved the verification process, allowing quicker access to shelter for families most in need.” In 2025 GCBHS Outreach Workers identified 329 families sleeping unsheltered in Greater Cincinnati.

When locating a family, staff provide them with general support and

information regarding services that are available through GCBHS and other providers in the community. The team reports information back to the CAP line staff about the families they have verified as well as those they are unable to locate (if a family is not located there is a structure in place to manage next steps). Families are then prioritized and the most vulnerable are given access to shelter.

Kelly Palmer has been with GCBHS for almost 17 years. She is one of several staff who assist with the program. The teams go out in groups of two, around 6 am and spend several hours attempting to locate families, before heading back to the office and beginning their regular workday. “It’s pretty motional,” she says. “Typically, we are seeing these families in their cars or living outside. Once we found someone living in an abandoned boat. When it’s winter and the temperature gets so cold…it’s difficult to see children living like this.”

When it’s winter and the temperature gets so cold…it’s difficult to see children living like this.”

She continues, “Sometimes we run two teams per day because the need is so great. And there’s not enough shelters. These people have or had jobs. Maybe they lost their job because they took time off for health reasons and they were terminated. Some are leaving a domestic violence situation. It can happen so quickly. So many people are just a paycheck away from losing their housing. It’s easy to get into this situation. The one commonality is that they are all in desperate need.”