Lanay Thomas just wrapped up her first year at UC Blue Ash. She's made new friends and is working toward a degree in psychology, but not long ago, higher education felt like a far-off dream for her.
Thomas spent her childhood frequently moving from place to place, often staying with family friends and sleeping on couches. Like thousands of other children in Cincinnati, she was homeless and had more to worry about than filling out college applications.
"It was just something that wasn't of my concern," Thomas said. "My concern was what we were going to eat."
That was until she met counselors from Project Connect, a student advocacy and resource service at Cincinnati Public Schools (CPS) focused on aiding students dealing with homelessness.
The service provides clothing, food, school supplies, transportation, and emergency housing in certain circumstances for the rapidly rising number of students experiencing homelessness in the city.
Data from Cincinnati Public Schools shows that, in the past decade, student homelessness increased by more than 50%, going from 2,438 students in 2015 to 4,304 during the 2023-2024 school year. Nearly 3,000 of those students are enrolled at CPS.
Project Connect's program manager, Rebeka Beach, says the severity of homelessness has worsened, too.
"Not only are we serving more, but the living situations have really changed. We used to serve a lot of families who are what we call doubled-up, or couch surfing, or living in a shelter. [Now,] we're seeing more and more families who are unhoused, meaning they're in a vehicle, or living outside, or in a place not fit for human habitation," she said.
Beyond providing essential services, Project Connect is also working to get more students enrolled in higher education. Beach says the program is reaching out to students like Thomas who have career goals, but might not know how to reach them.
That's where counselors like Danielle Rains come in. Rains is a district homeless liaison who mainly works with high school students in their senior year. If a student shows an interest in college, she's there to help them take the next step.
"I always say that all of my students are brilliant and have such insane potential, but a lot of times their circumstances are what have prevented them from reaching their potential," she said.
Rains says the most common barrier is financial aid paperwork and a lack of understanding of the resources available to them in college.
"They don't have a model for that," she told WVXU. "They don't have, a lot times, a parent that they can go to to talk about that and the steps to get there."
When Thomas was a student at Clark Montessori High School she says Rains answered many of her questions about student aid, applications, and writing college admission essays. Then, after she was accepted into UC Blue Ash, she was quickly connected to housing and other services through the university, which made a potentially intimidating situation much more comfortable.
"All I know is instability, so having somewhere where I'm like, 'Okay, I can lay my head here and I know that I'm fine for a while,' It's a good feeling."
Making that transition to college easier for students is what the University of Cincinnati's Assistant Vice Provost for Student Affairs, Felicia Wallace, has been working on over the past several years.
She says the university recognizes many of the economic barriers that students who've experienced homelessness deal with when continuing their education and is connecting them with resources to set them up for success. When she first started at UC almost two decades ago, she says there was almost no formalized services to help students coming from poverty, but now that's changed dramatically.
UC's campus housing for first generation college students and those who have dealt with homelessness, called 1MPACT House, opened in 2018. Offering more than just a roof over one's head, the house hosts mentoring and tutoring programs, academic advising sessions, financial aid and employment workshops, and even cooking classes.
"You can get support even in your pajamas because they're right there to help you," Wallace said about the house.
That support is critical for students that don't have someone in their family that can provide personalized advice for dealing with the stress of college life or that can offer a place to stay during breaks.
According to Wallace, the housing option and additional supports have improved the retention rate among these students, and the community built inside its walls is removing the stigma around youth homelessness, setting more students up for long-term success.
Thomas says she's now a part of a community of students who went through similar experiences in childhood. She hopes these relationships show younger students entering college that it's OK to open up and seek the help they need.
She says that support is helping her do what nobody else in her family has done before: earn a bachelor's degree. Thomas' mother dropped out college when she became pregnant with her, which has provided the soon-to-be college sophomore with even more motivation to finish what she started.
"My mom just always told me she wanted me to go to college, and I also wanted that for myself as well because I saw the importance of education. Especially as a Black woman, I just wanted to have that," Thomas said.
Staff at Project Connect say the strong relationship with the University of Cincinnati is giving the city's most vulnerable students a chance to pursue their academic dreams. Now, they say, the next step is creating a more robust network with other school districts and colleges around the region so students in Cincinnati and beyond can feel confident stepping onto any college campus they choose.
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