Medina County’s first homeless shelter has served more than 200 people since it opened a year ago.
Prior to the shelter, the county relied on a patchwork of churches and other organizations to find people emergency housing. In 2025, Medina County had 44 people experiencing homelessness, up from 34 people in 2018, according to data from the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio.
Next Step Up in Medina opened last February as an emergency housing shelter with 27 beds, two cribs and room for dogs and cats.
The shelter has had a big impact in its first year, Emergency Housing Assistance Program Director Jessie Kane said.
“We’ve already in 2026, we’ve already housed seven households, so that’s people who are going and signing their own leases," she said. "And for people experiencing homelessness, that’s not easy.”
The shelter also offers case management and connections to mental health and addiction services, Kane said.
“Helps them stabilize," she said. "Gives them a place obviously to go and then a place to really rebuild.”
After settling into the shelter for a couple days, a designated case manager works with people living at the shelter, offering wraparound services, Kane said.
“Every week, she checks in with them," she said. "She creates new plans, new goals – really focusing on not only the reasons why the became homeless in the first place, but how are we going to get you out of homelessness and keep you there?”
The shelter is unique, as it’s open to men, women, children and pets, Kane said, which was intentional.
"We are already seeing though that if we did not have the spaces for the pets that we would have seen much more street homelessness," she said.
Next Step Up is owned and managed by the Medina Metropolitan Housing Authority but acts as its own nonprofit, getting its funding from state grants, individual donors and money from local municipalities and the county, she said. Kane said that's a relief, as funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has been clawed back for many housing programs under the Trump administration.
"Nothing is guaranteed, especially at the federal level with HUD," she said. "We can't count on those dollars, so we have to look locally to see what we can raise."
