The Ohio State University College of Social Work is pleased to announce its new partnership with the Ohio Attorney General’s Office in the creation and funding of a new pilot program that will help families harmed by parental opioid abuse.

Ohio START (Sobriety, Treatment, and Reducing Trauma) is an intervention program that will provide specialized victim services, such as intensive trauma counseling, to children who have suffered victimization due to parental drug use. The program, to be initiated in 14 Ohio counties, will also provide drug treatment for parents of children referred to the program.

College of Social Work’s Drs. Bridget Freisthler, Katie Maguire-Jack, Alicia Bunger and Susan Yoon will be directly involved in evaluating the effectiveness of Ohio START.

According to the Public Children Services Association of Ohio, 50 percent of children placed in foster care in 2015 were placed due to abuse and neglect associated with parental drug use. Ohio START will bring together child protective services, peer mentors, the courts, and behavioral health and treatment providers to work closely with families whose children have been abused or neglected due to parental addiction in Athens, Clermont, Clinton, Fairfield, Fayette, Gallia, Highland, Jackson, Perry, Pickaway, Pike, Hocking, Ross and Vinton counties.

Child welfare workers will partner with a certified peer mentor to meet with each family once a week to ensure the safety of the child and provide support to parents. If a child can safely stay in the home during this process, the child can do so with the oversight of caseworkers. Otherwise, kids will have regular visitation with their parents as they undergo drug treatment, which will be paid for by Medicaid or private insurance. Family reunification will occur after parents have a minimum of six months of documented sobriety.

As part of their evaluation, College of Social Work faculty will examine what elements of the Ohio START pilot are most successful in parents regaining sobriety, maintaining treatment, and reducing future recurrence of child abuse or neglect. Unique to this initiative is a particular focus on improving the well-being of the children affected by parental opioid use. Expected results are the availability of more substance abuse-related services and resources for families in the child welfare system.

“We are very excited to be collaborating with the Ohio Attorney General’s Office on this important project,” says Professor Bridget Freisthler. “The opioid crisis has been especially harmful to families and young children, yet few counties have the resources to provide additional interventions and services to this vulnerable population. By funding this project, the Attorney General’s Office recognizes that the youngest victims of this epidemic need additional support to enhance their safety and well-being.”

The program will primarily be funded through a $3.5 million Victims of Crime Act (VOCA) grant from the Ohio Attorney General’s Office which will be shared among the counties over two and a half years. These grant funds will be specifically spent to help county child welfare agencies identify children who have been victimized due to parental drug use and provide them with specialized treatment for any resulting behavioral or emotional trauma. The grant will also fund victim services for parents with underlying victimization that may be contributing to their addiction.

Casey Family Programs, which partnered with the Ohio Attorney General’s Office to develop the Ohio START program, is providing an additional $75,000 for the pilot program. Both grants will be administered by the Public Children Services Association of Ohio.

For more information about the pilot, contact Professor Bridget Freisthler at Freisthler.19@osu.edu.

For media inquiries, contact Frankie Jones-Harris, Communications Director at the College of Social Work, at 614-330-2206 or Jones-Harris.1@osu.edu.

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It seems simple enough: Gather a group of young kids and older adults at a neighborhood center, involve them in creative activities they will enjoy and benefit from, add some smiles and hugs and – bingo — everybody goes home happier, healthier and a bit smarter.

Only, it’s never simple to bring different generations together in a planned, structured setting, even under the best conditions.

And it’s most assuredly not simple when the kids and seniors live in poverty, there’s nobody with expertise to organize activities, and there’s not even a building available to gather in. What’s more, getting a place up and running would take millions of dollars, require innovative planning and endless collaboration, and involve navigating a thicket of legal, regulatory and licensing issues.

In short, that’s what the Champion Intergenerational Enrichment and Education Center is all about and what it had to overcome. Yet seven years after it was first envisioned, the center is a reality and a lynchpin in a broader plan to transform the Near East Side. And it happened in large part because of the OSU College of Social Work and the planning, persistence and vision of Associate Professor Holly Dabelko-Schoeny, Professor Shannon Jarrott and Dean Tom Gregoire.

The first of its kind in central Ohio, the center officially opened Dec. 9 in the former Poindexter Community Building at 240 N. Champion Ave., a building that four years ago was scheduled to be demolished. Cynthia Dougherty, a PhD student in social work, is program director.

The Champion center provides preschool and early childhood education, adult day services, support for caregivers and parents, and basic medical assistance. When kids and adults get together, they might spend time reading, mixing cookie dough or planting seeds in the garden. Activities are designed to build relationships, improve health and wellness, develop educational skills in children, and create a sense of purpose in the elderly. The center will serve about 50 kids and 50 adults each day.

“The idea is to harness the power of both generations,” says Dabelko-Schoeny, who has been involved with the project since its inception.

“Programs like this provide meaning and improve well-being through engagement. They also overcome assumptions about aging and disability. And then there’s the learning component. They improve literacy, educate and train caregivers, and provide a workshop to teach students who aspire to go into child care or work with the elderly.”

Early on, Dabelko-Schoeny reached out to Jarrott, an expert on best practices for intergenerational programs and, at the time, a professor at Virginia Tech and director of research for the university’s Neighbors Growing Together program. As it turns out, Gregoire also reached out to Jarrott, eventually persuading her to join the CSW faculty and to lend her expertise to the Champion team.

Jarrott has been impressed with the planning done by the team. “It was time well spent,” she says. “It’s clear they sought input from clients and stakeholders to identify shared values and to come up with a shared mission. In a complicated process like this, voices need to be heard and relationships need to be built and sustained.”

The center is able to serve so many functions — and was so tricky to create — because of the expansive list of community, university and government partners involved. National Church Residences provides services for seniors, and Columbus Early Learning Centers directs child development programs. The colleges of Medicine, Social Work and Nursing will help develop intergenerational programming while pursuing opportunities for research, teaching and community engagement.

And then there’s the bigger picture, the plan to add housing, reduce crime, improve educational opportunities and increase employment in the neighborhood. Ohio State, the city of Columbus and the Columbus Metropolitan Housing Authority are key players here, all under the direction of a nonprofit called Partners Achieving Community Transformation, or more commonly, PACT.

“It’s pretty awesome to see the efforts on the East Side,” Jarrott says. “It’s exciting that the university is there. I have a high sense of confidence that residents are being heard and the university is responding.”

Oddly, the Champion center’s roots go back not to any of the three lead colleges involved, but the OSU Office of Human Resources. Concern was growing among faculty and staff about the wait for child care and the need to tend to elderly parents and relatives. An idea for a campus intergenerational center was hatched in 2008 and later fleshed out at a World Café sponsored in part by the College of Social Work and facilitated by Assistant Dean Lisa Durham. When money became an issue, the idea was expanded to include the larger community and was folded into the PACT plan.

But moving from plan to production proved difficult within the university. “Nobody would commit to it,” remembers Dabelko-Schoeny. “The problem was, Who would own it?”

Help came from Stillman Hall.

“Something that Social Work brings to the table is we have a dean who is available and very nimble,” she said. “Because Tom believed in the idea, he was instrumental in moving the deans forward. And once Medicine and Nursing committed, it got the ball rolling.”

Now that the center is open, Dabelko-Schoeny is looking ahead to research, possibly studying how kids and adults at Champion are affected by food insecurity. “The neighborhood is an 800-acre food desert,” she says. “There are corner stores around, but it’s mostly chips and cigarettes and that sort of thing.”

Jarrott hopes to develop longitudinal studies to examine how Champion and other intergenerational programs affect kids’ perception of aging. “Children in these programs tend to have greater empathy and lower anxiety about aging,” she said. “They tend to have more positive expectations of old age.”

For both women, the experience has been challenging, sometimes frustrating, and overwhelmingly rewarding. Along the way, a deep friendship blossomed. In fact, Dabelko-Schoeny’s commitment to adult day services and her passion for research played a big part in Jarrott’s decision to move to Columbus.

“Holly’s going to have a hard time shaking me,” she says.