ACCESS Shelter, the emergency shelter for women and children in Summit County who are experiencing homelessness, received a $1.25 million grant from the Bezos Day 1 Families Fund, according to a news release.

The gift is the largest in the nonprofit’s history. 

“It’s a good day,” Jackie Hemsworth, ACCESS’ executive director, told Signal Akron. “It’s been a tough year for a lot of us and a year of uncertainty. It makes us rest a little easier.”

ACCESS has had a plan in the works for the last 18 months or so to increase its shelter space by about 80%, Hemsworth said. The agency purchased the building next door to the current shelter on West Market Street in Akron’s West Hill neighborhood. In September, they moved their administrative offices into the new building to free up more shelter space.

Because of an uncertain funding climate, they put a capital campaign on hold, Hemsworth said. But now, knowing they’ll have the Bezos grant over the next five years, the agency feels able to take on the next phase of the expansion.

They’ll use the money to pay off the mortgage on the new building and do the construction work in 2026 to open up the first six additional bedrooms in the shelter. 

Signal background

Waitlist for ACCESS Shelter is more than 100 households

The additional space will help serve the 100+ households (families and single women) Hemsworth said are on a waitlist “at all times.” 

Fifteen rooms are open at the shelter, including 13 rooms for families and two for single women – the two rooms serve seven women at any given time. She said they have about 50 people at the shelter right now, which is a low-barrier shelter, which means entry requirements for clients are kept to a minimum so they have immediate, easy access to a safe space. 

“$1.25 million is just so incredible, over five years. It really gives us room to imagine a future where we aren’t having mothers and children sleeping outside and sleeping in cars and taking care of our community the way that we should be,” Hemsworth said. 

ACCESS, Inc. was founded in 1984 to address a critical shortage in shelter for homeless women and children, identified at the time by a local survey.

The Day 1 Families Fund, which was started in 2018 by Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos, has awarded 280 grants totaling more than $850 million to organizations serving families in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and Guam.

This year, the fund issued a total of $102.5 million in grants to 32 organizations.

Editor-in-Chief (she/her)
Zake has deep roots in Northeast Ohio journalism. She was the managing editor for multimedia and special projects at the Akron Beacon Journal, where she began work as a staff photographer in 1986. Over a 20-year career, Zake worked in a variety of roles across departments that all help inform her current role as Signal Akron's editor in chief. Most recently, she was a journalism professor and student media adviser at Kent State University, where she worked with the next generation of journalists to understand public policy, environmental reporting, data and solutions reporting. Among her accomplishments was the launch of the Kent State NewsLab, an experiential and collaborative news commons that connects student reporters with outside professional partners.