The opioid crisis is personal for Brenda Ryan.
She started her nonprofit, Keys 2 Serenity, in Cuyahoga Falls after her own daughter, Sheena, passed away from an opioid overdose in 2016. Sheena was survived by her 5-year-old child.
Rob Eldridge collects scraps of his childhood. At his vintage toy shop in Xenia, the shelves are stocked with all the obsessions of his adolescence: G.I Joes, hot wheels and superheroes.
“That robot right there, that Shogun warrior robot from Japan,” Eldridge said, pointing at a menacing-looking cyborg. “That was my favorite toy.”
The Sons and Daughters of Pioneer Rivermen have been celebrating inland waterways for 85 years. The organization is dedicated to the people — and boats — of America’s river history. But now, they’re turning to the future.
When she was 10 years old, Logan Cover caught a glimpse of her future at a wheelchair basketball camp at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.
“From then on, I knew that was the first college I wanted to go to, and I wanted to play basketball for them,” Cover said.
Heidi Geib always knew she wanted to work in medicine. Well, sort of.
“I really love the medical world,” Geib says. “But I hate blood, needles, all that stuff.”
Sandy Muntean served as one of the first female military police officers in the U.S. Army. Times were different back in the ‘70s, she remembered.
“There are quite a few men that didn't think women should do that kind of work,” she said. “And I thought, ‘Well, no, you're wrong.’”
Ohio’s six state-run psychiatric hospitals are nearly full. Their patients are almost exclusively individuals coming from the criminal justice system – including those transferred from jails, those found incompetent to stand trial and those found not guilty by reason of insanity.
Every Saturday, Trish Perry sets up a table with hot dogs, harm reduction kits and winter coats on Main Street in Newark. Her organization, Newark Homeless Outreach, hasn’t missed a weekend in the last six years.
The National Housing Preservation database estimates that in the next five years, affordability restrictions will expire on about 14,000 rental homes in Ohio that were built with low-income housing tax credits.
Homelessness is on the rise across the state in both urban and more rural areas. However, rural communities often lack shelter spaces and resources to address it.
So, they’re getting creative. Advocates in North Central Ohio found a solution in a former nightclub.
