The nonprofits helps single moms bring their children to better neighborhoods.
By Steve Wartenburg
Columbus CEO
The phone call from Families Flourish couldn’t have come at a better time for Bessie Jackson and her two sons, Braylon, 12, and Derius, 8. “We were technically homeless,” Jackson says. Her grandmother’s old, drafty, money pit of a home on the East Side where she and her boys were living had caught fire four days earlier and was uninhabitable. Jackson, a home health care worker, had lost her job.
“We were living in a hotel,” she says.
It was 2018, and Jackson had been accepted into the three-year pilot of Families Flourish, a collaboration between Ohio State University’s city and regional planning program and community organizations. The guiding principle is that single mothers and their children do better in higher-opportunity, safer neighborhoods with better school systems. The problem: These neighborhoods are…
