Mission

Mission Statement: Providence House keeps kids safe and families together, embracing them with support to enhance stability that strengthens communities. Providence House was founded in 1981 as Ohio’s first licensed crisis nursery, providing emergency shelter for infants and young children living in crisis, such as homelessness and unsafe housing. Since then, we’ve evolved to become one of the nation’s only licensed Family Preservation Crisis Nursery programs and one of the largest and longest-operating licensed crisis nurseries in North America, serving infants and children up to 12 years old. In the past 45 years, we’ve cared for over 20,000 children and families across Northeast Ohio, serving as an upstream intervention within the regional social service landscape. We are a national leader and innovator in family unification with an evidence-based and holistic approach to crisis intervention, child safety, and family preservation. Our focus on family unification represents a dynamic shift in child welfare away from reunification, which attempts to put families back together after traumatic separations, like custody loss and foster care, have already occurred. Over the past 16 consecutive years, our Family Preservation Services helped 99% of the children we cared for stay united with their families. Additionally, our efforts to keep children out of foster care and offer parents/guardians resources, referrals, and tools that address instability, build health and economic mobility, and strengthen parenting skills have saved Cuyahoga County/Greater Cleveland over $7 million in the last five years. Our Licenses and Accreditations: Providence House is licensed by the Ohio Department of Children and Youth as a Children's Crisis Care Facility and certified Qualified Residential Treatment Program (QRTP). We are accredited by the Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities (CARF), an Ohio Department of Behavioral Health (OMHAS) and Medicaid certified behavioral health provider, and are recognized as the first and only Crisis Nursery program in the national California Evidence Based Clearinghouse (CEBC) as a research-informed, evidence-based program.