Women Helping Women execs outline intervention, prevention programs

The meeting was held, as it is normally, in Room 603 at the Todd B. Portune Center for County Government, 138 E. Court St., in downtown Cincinnati. Spectators and presenters were in attendance, as were the three commissioners, an assistant county prosecutor, county administrator, assistant commission clerk and chief clerk. The commission’s YouTube feed began at approximately 10:02 a.m. The meeting adjourned at 11:05 a.m.

Commissioners present

• Denise Driehaus, president
• Alicia Reece (arrived late)
• Stephanie Summerow Dumas
• Jeff Aluotto, county administrator
• Patrick Dressing, assistant prosecuting attorney

Approximate time spent during the meeting

•  N/A   on time: Call to order; Introductions
•    37    minutes: Green Umbrella Climate Action Fellowship
•    19    minutes: Women Helping Women
•    07 minutes: Public Comment
•    n/a   minutes: Executive Session 

Agenda

The agenda featured three items:

ITEM 1.  Green Umbrella Climate Action Fellowship

Hamilton County wanted to create one of the first programs in the nation to evaluate where a county is in terms of climate change and sustainability, said Brad Johnson, county environmental services department director.

The Green Umbrella Climate Action Fellowship, which is attempting to fulfill that idea, offers a third-party to look at climate change and sustainability with a fresh eye, Johnson said.

Green Umbrella Fellows who presented to the commission were Ava Heffernan, a third-year student at Ohio State University studying environmental policy and psychology, and Shobha Pai, a second-year master’s student in communications at the University of Cincinnati whose interests include community engagement, event coordination, multimedia content creation and research.

“They’ve done a lot of work in 10 weeks,” Johnson said. This is the second year of the fellowship, which operated from May 28 through Aug. 8 and expanded from three to seven fellows assigned to five area governments (Hamilton County, Oxford, Fairfield and Milford in Ohio and Newport in Northern Kentucky).

Green Umbrella is a regional climate collaborative. One of its larger projects is to build a sustainability plan that connects all 49 county jurisdictions to focus their efforts under a shared vision, Pai said.

“It’s not just about studying climate issues, it’s about actively working on them in real time with real-world people,” Pai said.

Heffernan said part of their research shows that the industrial and transportation sectors produce more greenhouse emissions in the county than commercial, residential or agriculture sectors. Some other projects the fellows have delivered, Heffernan and Pai said, include creating surveys for county departments and residents (results have not been released yet, Heffernan said), an outline for a website and a list of contacts from among the 49 jurisdictions in the county.

The fellowship has laid the groundwork to connect climate action work that is occurring throughout the county in a disconnected way. Now the fellows are asking the BOCC to “champion the development and adoption of the sustainability plan” and formally endorse the steering committee for this plan, Heffernan said.That would include encouraging and enabling  coordination between departments.

Summerow Dumas asked for details about the steering committee – whether its makeup would be diverse and how large it would be. Heffernan and Pai said that, so far, eight people have expressed interest and the fellows are looking to add community partners and potentially youth members.

Johnson said the goal is to present a formal county Green Umbrella plan in 2026.

ITEM 2. Women Helping Women

In Southwest Ohio, WHW is the only rape crisis center in the five-county region the organization serves. WHW also serves survivors of domestic violence, making WHW a “dual agency” – the only agency in the region providing comprehensive support for both sexual assault and domestic violence survivors.

WHW CEO Kristin Shrimplin said the presentation was to give a snapshot of WHW’s responses to what the organization has been seeing in the first six months of 2025.

There are some trends to report, COO Amy Bleser said:

• A 36% increase in domestic violence response to hospitals
•  49% of survivors report having a disability
•  55% of survivors are reporting strangulation (one of WHW’s biggest concerns as the criminal charge has been enhanced from a misdemeanor to a felony). WHW tracks this trend because of the high levels of lethality, she said.
•  84% of survivors have at least one minor child
•  96% of students report feeling confident setting boundaries with a dating partner
•  94% of students report feeling confident in identifying signs of a healthy relationship.

“We’ve heard a lot, post-COVID, that the numbers were escalating, and now you’ve given us evidence of that continued trend,” Driehaus said, “so it’s bad news, but good information for us to have as we figure out how to allocate dollars.” 

Driehaus wondered about the low participation numbers for the WHW DVERT program (36 of 49 jurisdictions) and the low participation numbers for the WHW Prevent & Empower Prevention Education program (16 schools countywide are participating).

Driehaus questioned whether those numbers are a reflection of the capacity of WHW by way of financing and staffing or if it is a matter of access. She pointed out that the participation from 36 of 49 jurisdictions “is pretty darn good.”

“For DVERT, it’s been a mixture of those dynamics …  It has been hard finding staff,” Bleser said, noting that the City of Cincinnati is one of the program participants.   Other county jurisdictions are less engaged with WHW at this point, she said. 

Shrimplin said, “A lot of this is access. We have the financial support. … We cannot activate staffing if we don’t have some of those remaining smaller jurisdictions providing that access.”

Driehaus asked WHW to furnish the commissioners with a list of jurisdictions participating in DVERT and those that are not. BOCC wants to partner with WHW to have all 49 jurisdictions participating, she said.

Capacity and access also affect participation in the prevention program WHW offers to schools, said Amber Malott, VP of programming: “We need more access and connectivity” so schools know that this service is free and how it satisfies Erin’s Law criteria, she said.

“We are geared up and ready for the fall,” Mallott said. The organization is  doing intentional outreach to middle schools because the focus has primarily been on high schools.

Summerow Dumas expressed concern that only 47 survivors have attended a support group virtually or in person as of the second quarter 2025. Bleser, in response, said survivors often prefer one-on-one sessions with an advocate.

The BOCC has partnered with WHW on significant projects in recent years, including the Hamilton County Commission on Women & Girls in 2024. In 2024, WHW served more than 8,500 survivors of assault and domestic violence and responded with nearly 37,000 crisis services in Southwest Ohio.

Public Comment

Orlando Sonza was called to the mic to offer comment as outgoing county veteran services commission executive director. His tenure ends Aug. 13 as he has been tapped to join the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

He said that while he was there to give a mid-year report about the commission, he thanked the BOCC for its support of the Veteran Services Commission (VSC) under his watch. Reece lauded the VSC for advertising its second-annual military and veterans appreciation day, this year to be held on Aug. 23.

“I think this is something great,” she said, mentioning that more than 3,000 veterans and their families turned out in 2024.

ITEM 3. Executive Session (to discuss the sale or acquisition of property).

The BOCC then went into executive session and ended the meeting about 11:05 a.m. 

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