Improved Social Services

Advocating for An Improved Social Service Delivery System

Over-the-Rhine has become Hamilton County’s unofficial social services hub. These agencies often function with no intra-organization collaboration. The result is massive replication of services. It also means that people are drawn from all over the region to seek free food and shelter in OTR with a grossly inadequate system for helping them transition into permanently improved positions. Most of these facilities are run by people from outside the neighborhood, and some well-intentioned programs are extremely harmful to OTR. The OTR Foundation is not opposed to helping people, feeding the hungry, or giving shelter to the homeless. In fact, we want to encourage improvements in social service delivery to assure that these goals are more effectively reached and that increasing numbers of people can find substantive life change.

The first step in creating a workable system is to make social service delivery organizations enter reasonable collaborations, and to de-concentrate these services. Over-the-Rhine has 110 city blocks and almost one social service facility for every single block. There is one social worker employed in OTR for every 1.5 residents. Over 6,000 homeless and recently released sex offenders pass through shelters and transitional housing units in OTR annually. This exceeds the number of residents in the neighborhood by over 1,000. The Drop Inn Center alone claims to process around 70% of the area’s homeless males. The Freestore serves 54,000 people in a neighborhood that only has a population of 4,900. No neighborhood can sustain this type of constant onslaught of people in serious life crisis. It creates an environment that makes business growth almost impossible, and adds to the problems suffered by the people passing through shelters and soup kitchens. Concentrating the seriously mentally ill and people escaping abusive situations with addicts and felons is not the best way to help them. Building more transitional housing units for alcohol and drug-addicted people next to a bar notorious for drug dealing is not the best way to encourage real life change.

The Over-the-Rhine Foundation is dedicated to de-concentrating social services and poverty and creating a holistic, regional approach to social service delivery for the benefit of people in need as well as the business and residential communities of OTR.