Covington, KY – 2019 and 2024
Day 1 Families Fund grantee

As the only homelessness services provider offering assistance to families in northern Kentucky, Welcome House provides a holistic continuum of services—from street outreach to service coordination to rapid rehousing—that helps end homelessness for families. The organization is known as an innovator that embraces the use of evidence-informed practices to serve those in need.

This groundbreaking work and its strong reputation as a leader in the homelessness field led Welcome House to receive a $1.25 million grant from the Bezos Day 1 Families Fund in November 2019. “The grant has had a transformative impact on our organization, allowing us to significantly expand our capacity to support families. With these resources, we’ve been able to enhance our programs and services, empowering more families to secure stable housing and work toward lasting independence,” says Danielle Amrine, CEO of Welcome House.

The Day 1 Families Fund grant provided Welcome House with the means to improve its facilities, which were limited in capacity, inaccessible to people with physical disabilities, and spread across the local area, making it difficult for families to access multiple services. The team used the funds to build a state-of-the-art, 20,000-square-foot Shelter for Homeless Women, Children, and Families that serves as a one-stop shop for families seeking support and resources to achieve stability. Opened in 2023, the facility is designed to be sensitive to the trauma and instability that children may have experienced and to provide its inhabitants with security and a sense of belonging. The new facility can also shelter up to 65 people in families (including two-parent families, which many shelters don’t serve)—which is double the capacity Welcome House had before its Day 1 Families Fund grant. Since January 2020, Welcome House has provided shelter to more than 150 families, and 74% of them have exited the shelter into a positive housing situation.

The Welcome House team is thrilled to be a Day 1 Families Fund grant recipient again in 2024. The team plans to use its new funds to continue to expand the organization’s reach among families in rural areas throughout the state of Kentucky—a very underserved region. The funds will focus on increasing street outreach staff, providing supportive services, and purchasing cargo vans to reach remote rural areas. Welcome House also anticipates investing in incentives for landlords to provide rental units to homeless families, pay security deposits and first month’s rent, and cover utility arrears that prevent families from securing housing. “We want to make sure that we reach families that are staying outside and do everything we can to get them into housing or shelter as soon as possible,” Amrine says.