Residents express fear, uncertainty as Kaleidoscope prepares to end youth housing program

Eve, a pseudonym, entered into the Kaleidoscope Youth Center (KYC) housing program in March 2024, having recently fled what she described as an abusive home.

At the time, Eve said she knew little about KYC beyond the fact that the organization served the LGBTQ+ community. But the more she learned about the youth housing program, the more it appealed. In addition to weekly meetings with a KYC case worker, the program also offered Eve a more open-ended stay than any of the other housing options she encountered, providing a place of stability from which she could finally begin to plan for the future.

“I moved in a bit after I turned 18, so it’s given me time to get settled, get a job, work on my mental health, and then to work on scholarships so I can eventually go to college,” said Eve, who envisioned starting classes at Columbus State Community College and then transferring to Ohio State University with the aim of earning a forestry degree and going on to a career in wildlife research. “And I still want to do that. It’s just that the plans have been a bit… disrupted.”

On Sept. 16, KYC announced that it would be closing its housing program for queer youth after the Ohio Department of Health (ODH) declined to renew the Columbus-based nonprofit’s grant funding. Established in 2019, the housing program has since served more than 50 people between the ages of 18 and 24 who were experiencing homelessness, with 10 youths currently housed in four units spread across a pair of duplexes adjacent to German Village and campus. The housing program is currently expected to end in mid-November, though KYC continues to pursue funding options with the aim of extending residency through the expiration of its final apartment lease in July 2026.

In addition to these efforts, a crowdfunding campaign has also been launched, the proceeds from which will be distributed directly to the impacted residents. And KYC is currently seeking people with the means to sponsor youths for up to six months, providing financial assistance “to support moving costs, furnishings, and general stabilization.” Additionally, a benefit concert spearheaded by Trans Experimental Action is scheduled to take place at Cafe Bourbon St. on Nov. 18, featuring performances from didi, Erica Dawn Lyle, and Senza Titulo, with proceeds benefitting the program residents.

The closure of the KYC housing program arrives at a point in time when funding cuts at the federal level are threatening programs benefiting the unhoused and the housing insecure nationwide. In May, the Dispatch reported that Columbus joined a handful of cities in filing a federal lawsuit that challenged proposed cuts to programs used to fight homelessness, which if enacted would result in Community Shelter Board losing nearly $1 million in Housing and Urban Development grant money.

“Shelters are operating in an environment where homelessness is increasing in our community but … capacity is not increasing and funding is not increasing,” said YWCA president and CEO Elizabeth Brown. “When we opened the YWCA Family Center 20 years ago, it took on average 18 days to rehouse a family. That meant that when someone arrived, our team worked with them to identify the cause of their housing interruption, the barriers to regaining housing, how to eliminate them, and then match them with a landlord. … Today, it takes an average of 105 days to rehouse a family. And it’s not that our team forgot how to do its job, but there are so few housing options and housing dollars available that it’s harder than ever to place a family with the rapidity we need.”

These challenges are further intensified among nonprofits serving the trans community, which has been under unrelenting political attack in the months since President Donald Trump returned to office, stripped of everything from access to healthcare to the right to use the public bathroom that aligns with their gender. “It’s very easy, even as an organizer and activist, to kind of disassociate from how bad each thing is, because there are so many bad things happening all at once,” Trans Experimental Action member Juniper Czaja said in a February interview.

Erin Upchurch, whose tenure as the executive director of KYC will close in December, described the current political landscape as “a minefield” awash in unseen threats that can surface with zero notice to devastating impact. “It’s like we have this overarching threat, and this idea that we might not be safe, but I don’t quite know what’s going to be the thing,” she said. “We know we’re seeing overrepresentation of queer and trans people [among the unhoused]. … And even if they have a home and a job, the government is trying to eradicate them and take away rights. It’s like being a parent and not knowing how I’m going to protect my kids, to put it blatantly. I don’t know if I’m going to have enough food, or when the next check is going to come. … And that’s how I feel as a leader.” 

Considering this environment, Upchurch said she wasn’t caught off-guard when the grant renewal didn’t come through, even though the application submitted by the nonprofit contained identical details to the grant proposal accepted by ODH two years ago. (In a statement provided to the Dispatch, ODH said KYC’s application was missing “important key requirements throughout the narrative, making it difficult to understand how each deliverable would be carried out.”) 

The ending of certain Covid-era federal programs has further strained existing resources and intensified the housing crisis both in Ohio and across the nation. The winding down of Covid-era rental assistance programs, for instance, has led to a spike in evictions across Franklin County, with more than 18,000 already filed in 2025. And late in 2024, Brown joined the Community Shelter Board and other aligned groups in lobbying Columbus City Council to provide funding for emergency shelters when the loss of money previously available through the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 created a shortfall.

“Emergency shelters are … essentially the emergency department of our housing system, where if you’re in crisis, you go to the emergency room,” said Brown, who described these shelters as a necessary backstop in a system that does not have enough permanent supportive housing available to accommodate Columbus’ growing unhoused population. “And we warned the city and the county that this funding was going away, and they were responsive. … But because there is not a dedicated, sustainable, predictable revenue source for these shelters, we are again facing a crisis at the end of this year. And this record is going to repeat itself until we find a permanent source of revenue. And we’ve done that for the arts, which has the ticket fee. And we’ve done it for tourism, which has the bed tax. We believe shelter is … a public necessity that deserves its own dedicated source of funding.”

“If there’s a legislative agenda we should have, it should be to eradicate houselessness in our city,” Upchurch said. “And I don’t understand why we don’t have that bigger, shared vision of liberation in our community.”

Eve and TR, a fellow resident in the KYC housing program, said they received word of the program’s end during a mandatory all-house meeting held at the KYC facility downtown in early September. “And there was a lot of fear and uncertainty, because I’ve been homeless off and on for so long, and going back to that … at a time when queer hate crimes are going up is scary,” said TR, who lives in the same German Village-adjacent building as Eve, having come into the program two years ago following a stint living in various Cincinnati-area shelters. “Every time I’m on the bus, someone says weird things to me, which makes me afraid to go out. … I’m also Indigenous and Mexican American, so I’m worried about the increased ICE patrols – not just here, but everywhere. … The idea of being out constantly and not having a safe place to go back to, it’s a lot.”

For TR, the KYC housing program has provided the longest stretch of stability she can recall, allowing her to undertake the time-consuming process of applying for disability (TR has autism and walks with the aid of crutches) while simultaneously focusing on her mental and physical health in a way that has enabled her for the first time to really plan for the future. 

“It’s allowed me to build such good relationships with friends and with the community, which I’ve never really been able to do before, and which has been life-changing,” TR said. “I’m just a lot more of a positive person now, and I feel like I’m able to do a lot more than I used to be able to do. I’m able to handle a lot more. Well, I guess I’ve always handled a lot, but not very gracefully. And I’m able to handle more with grace now.”

This emerging trait has served TR well in recent weeks, as she’s taken on a part-time job and continued to navigate the labyrinthian process of applying for disability as a young person, all while researching potential housing options for when the KYC program closes. (As of early October, TR and Eve both had intake appointments scheduled with the youth shelter Huckleberry House.)

“And that’s the biggest thing. It’s not just the housing, but we have so much support [through KYC],” TR said. “If we’re having some sort of crisis after work hours, whether mental health or otherwise, there’s a person we can call and get support. And there’s [free monthly] bus passes and help with developing financial literacy. And then even just these small things, like I get help with cleaning my room and doing things like changing my sheets, which is something I struggle with physically. And all of these things that I’m going to be losing build up, and it’s frustrating.”

Ahead of Ohio Republicans passing a budget bill earlier this year, Upchurch said she joined colleagues from Equality Ohio and other similarly minded organizations in making calls to youth shelters across the state, urging them to press their representatives to preserve funding for nonprofits that serve the state’s most at-risk communities, and in particular the trans and nonbinary communities that make up 90 percent of those enrolled in KYC’s housing program.

“And I got a response from maybe two people, and they weren’t willing to [make those calls]. Some of them were afraid to lose funding, or harm relationships, and, respectfully, that I do understand,” Upchurch said. “But there’s not a collective sense of urgency, I think, among human service providers across the state, and I think it’s important to name that. … I have this belief in the people and the folks who do this work – the providers and therapists, and everybody who says they’re progressive or an ally – and I still have this expectation and this hope that these voices will all come together and say, ‘This is not okay.’ And it hasn’t quite happened yet. And we could go through all the reasons why, and I know it’s nuanced. But I have ten youths to help relocate, and I know there’s many, many more out there living on the land and in unsafe situations.”