A $115,000 grant will connect Northern Kentucky's fragmented social service agencies into a single digital network, aiming to end the cycle of families repeating their stories at every office door.

Horizon Community Foundation announced Aug. 13 that its 2026 Community Impact Fund award will go to the Northern Kentucky Social Services Transformation Project, a collaboration led by the Safety Net Alliance of Northern Kentucky. The grant serves Boone, Campbell and Kenton counties, meaning agencies in Fort Mitchell, Crestview Hills, Edgewood and Fort Wright are eligible to participate. The Northern Kentucky Area Development District is serving as fiscal agent.

The grant will build what organizers call the region's first interoperable Community Information Exchange. At its core is CareSuite, a shared client management platform piloted in partnership with United Way of Greater Cincinnati. Five organizations already use it: Brighton Center, Faith Community Health Network, FIESTA NKY, Gateway Community and Technical College and Erlanger-Elsmere Independent School District.

The project plans to expand that pilot from five to 20 organizations, creating a network where agencies can make referrals and confirm a client actually received help on the other end. That "closed-loop" referral system addresses a basic gap: under the current patchwork of disconnected databases, one agency has no way to know whether a family it referred somewhere else ever got served.

The network is expected to reach roughly 49,000 Northern Kentucky residents annually through participating organizations.

"By making one significant grant this year, we wanted to support a project with the potential to create lasting, region-wide change," said Nancy Grayson, president and CEO of Horizon Community Foundation.

The $115,000 will fund partner training, data integration, project management and development of a Community Resource Impact Dashboard. That dashboard will use anonymized data to help nonprofit leaders, funders and policymakers spot service gaps and measure outcomes across the region.

Horizon shifted its grantmaking strategy this year, awarding one large grant instead of several smaller ones. Through 2025, the foundation had invested $632,500 in nonprofits serving the three-county region. The 2026 award is the largest single grant in the fund's nine-year history.

The Safety Net Alliance, which leads the project, is a collaborative of more than 150 nonprofits, faith-based organizations, government agencies and funders across Northern Kentucky. Jared Mueller, the alliance's program implementation and operations manager at the NKY Area Development District, said in the announcement that the effort aims to remove barriers for families in crisis by connecting them immediately to a broader support network rather than requiring them to navigate each agency alone.

No implementation timeline or launch date has been announced. The project is in early development.

Upcoming community dates: The Lakeside Park mums sale benefiting deployed troops has orders due Sept. 11. Crestview Hills City Council takes up its 2026 tax rate at its next meeting.