SOUTHERN OHIO — Grandparents in southern Ohio who have stepped in to raise grandchildren affected by the opioid crisis are getting new support, after the Area Agency on Aging District 7 learned it has been approved for grant funding from the OneOhio Recovery Foundation.
The money will support a program called Pathways for Kinship Kids, which is aimed at grandparents raising grandchildren whose lives have been disrupted by substance use disorders. Instead of funding treatment directly, the program tackles the everyday costs that can overwhelm a kinship household on a fixed income.
The assistance will help cover school clothing and supplies for the children, along with the fees, uniforms and equipment they need to take part in extracurricular activities. For grandparents, those are often the expenses that arrive all at once at the start of a school year or a sports season, and they can decide whether a child gets to play, join or participate at all.
The award spans both of the foundation’s regional grant areas that cover the agency’s district. One region includes Adams, Brown, Fayette, Highland, Pickaway, Pike, Ross and Scioto counties, while the other includes Athens, Gallia, Hocking, Jackson, Lawrence, Meigs and Vinton counties — together covering all ten counties in the agency’s district and several more beyond it.
The grant is part of a $45.7 million round of regional funding from the OneOhio Recovery Foundation, the second round the foundation has distributed. The money comes from the share of national opioid settlement funds that Ohio receives from pharmaceutical companies over their role in the epidemic, with 55 percent of those funds flowing through the foundation.
Foundation officials say recipients are chosen through a locally driven review that weighs regional volunteers’ recommendations alongside an expert panel and the foundation’s board, with a preference for evidence-informed strategies. The agency’s award is presented as an investment in organizations already working on the front lines of substance use in their own communities.
The need behind the program is familiar across Appalachian Ohio, where grandparents have quietly become primary caregivers for a generation of children whose parents are in treatment, incarcerated or lost to addiction. Those arrangements keep children with family, but they often come with little formal support and tight household budgets stretched by a second round of child-raising.
With the award approved, the agency says its next step is to finalize the grant agreement and put the funds to work in the community. Once that paperwork is complete, eligible kinship families in the covered counties should be able to tap the help for school and activity costs.
