CALIFORNIA, Ky. — New funding is helping the northern Kentucky nonprofit, Holly Hill Child and Family Solutions, expand its services. The center offers various services for children and families. 

What You Need To Know

  •  Holly Hill Child and Family Solutions helps children and family with behavioral and mental health services

  •  This non-profit recently received some funding from Independence

  •  This funding will help reopen a cottage that's been shut down

  • It will help increase their services by 200-300%

Meghan Ackerman, Chief Innovation Officer, says her team offers therapy services, case management, supervised visitation and residential treatment. Her work is just part of the California, Kentucky space that helps house girls age 11 to 18 during a more vulnerable time.

“We specialize in victims of human trafficking and pregnant and parenting youth so we really work to create a safe environment and help them even just trust adults again and that can be really hard and really challenging,” Ackerman said.

Since the pandemic, they haven’t been able to use one of the cottages which once provided more services.

“When I first got here, we were working on expanding services and then the pandemic hit, so we did close down the cottage so that we could support the youth we had at the time with the staff that we had,” she said.

Chief Executive Officer James Sherry told Spectrum News 1, $100,000 in ARPA funds from the City of Independence is going toward their immediate needs campaign. It will allow them to reopen the cottage and increase the number of children they support by 200-300%. Sherry and Ackerman said the need for residential, mental and behavioral health services is there.

“Almost 10% of the kids that we have supported in the last few years have come from Independence. We predominantly focus on northern Kentucky, but where there’s a specific need, we’ll support kids from all over the state as well,” Sherry said.

Ackerman said she’s excited to see a cottage space reopen to serve more young people because she knows since the pandemic they’re seeing more children dealing with trauma and other mental health issues. She says her mission is to help them work through the challenges and see them come out on top.

“For every youth I get to admit into our programming, it’s another youth that I know that I will get to watch, discharge our programming and be part of their journey and that’s just incredibly rewarding,” she said.

The center hopes to reopen the cottage sometime this summer.