LANCASTER — Harcum House in Lancaster will receive $50,000 in state grant funding to support services for survivors of human trafficking, the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette reported, citing a community announcement on the awards.
The Lancaster award is part of more than $2 million the Ohio Office of Criminal Justice Services is distributing through its Direct Services for Victims of Human Trafficking Grant Program, according to the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette. Thirty-two nonprofit organizations serving 35 Ohio counties will receive funding in this round.
The money can be used for the services survivors need most in the months after they leave a trafficking situation: victim advocacy, mental health care, education and employment support, and shelter and housing programs, according to the announcement reported by the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette. For a local provider like Harcum House, that flexibility matters — a single grant can help cover the advocate who sits with a survivor at a court hearing, the counseling that follows, and the housing support that makes the rest possible.
Fairfield County appears twice in this round of awards. The Salvation Army of Central Ohio, which serves Fairfield County and 13 other counties, also was awarded $94,000 through the program, the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette reported. Between Harcum House’s $50,000 and the Salvation Army’s regional award, Fairfield County survivors will have two funded doors to knock on — one local and one regional.
Nonprofit organizations providing direct support to trafficking victims, or to people considered at high risk of trafficking, were eligible for the grants, according to the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette. Priority consideration went to applicants demonstrating evidence-based and survivor-informed programming — services designed with survivors’ own experience in the room, rather than built only from the outside.
The program itself is relatively young. Gov. Mike DeWine launched the grant program in 2023 to address the needs of sex and labor trafficking victims in Ohio, the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette reported. It was developed in partnership with the Ohio General Assembly and initially funded through the state’s previous two-year operating budget.
That the program still exists is itself a decision worth noting: Ohio’s fiscal 2026-27 operating budget continued funding for the trafficking grant program, according to the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette, which is why a new round of awards — including Harcum House’s — is flowing now. Anti-trafficking advocates have long argued that one-time awareness campaigns do little without exactly this kind of sustained, services-first funding behind them.
The grants are administered by the Ohio Office of Criminal Justice Services, a division of the Ohio Department of Public Safety, the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette reported. The office serves as Ohio’s lead justice planning and assistance agency and administers state and federal criminal justice funding across the state.
The structure of the round tells its own story about how Ohio is fighting trafficking in 2026: rather than concentrating the money in the state’s largest cities, the Office of Criminal Justice Services spread more than $2 million across 32 organizations in 35 counties, according to the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette — a bet that survivors are best reached by the local nonprofits they already trust. Harcum House’s $50,000 is one of the smaller awards in the round, but in a county-seat community like Lancaster it lands with an organization whose entire mission is the population the program exists to serve.
What we know — and what we’re still waiting on. Confirmed: Harcum House will receive $50,000, the statewide round tops $2 million across 32 organizations in 35 counties, and the Salvation Army of Central Ohio receives $94,000 for a service area that includes Fairfield County, all according to the announcement reported by the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette. Still to come: Harcum House’s own breakdown of how it will allocate the award among advocacy, counseling, education support and housing, and the grant period’s start and reporting dates from the Office of Criminal Justice Services.
The award continues a run of outside investment in Fairfield County care and charity this month — Lancaster Meijer employees just directed their own $5,000 gifts to a youth mental health foundation and the county humane society, and state housing money is reaching Southeast Ohio families through a home-repair grant for Hocking, Athens and Perry counties.
What happens next is the unglamorous part that decides whether the money changes lives: the Office of Criminal Justice Services finalizes the grant agreements, Harcum House puts the $50,000 to work across its survivor services in Lancaster, and Fairfield County residents who need help — or who know someone who might — have a funded local program to call.