About the Task Force

The Task Force is a community-driven initiative working to address Darke County’s housing and provider shortage crisis. It brings together residents, service providers, employers, faith communities, local government, and people with direct experience of housing loss and recovery, and it works in the open — publishing what it plans to do, and what it has actually done.

This website is the Task Force’s central information and access hub. Its purpose is to make sure the public, stakeholders, and the people most affected — along with those supporting them — can find information and tools without having to know who to ask first.

What the Task Force is working toward

The Task Force is dedicated to empowering community members, organizations and policymakers to support prevention and recovery, while ensuring all Darke County residents have access to basic needs like housing, mental health care, addiction recovery services and support.

How that work shows up here

This site does four things, and they are the four things the Task Force does.

• It reports on the Task Force’s progress. The strategic plan, the activities set against it, and the goals that work is evaluated on are published as they are recorded, alongside regular progress reports.
• It gathers what is actually available. Housing, emergency shelter, employment that pays a living wage, mental health care, addiction recovery support and basic needs services — collected from the providers offering them, reviewed by a Task Force moderator, and published with enough detail to act on.
• It keeps count. The listings on this site also produce the access statistics the Task Force uses to describe the shortage honestly, rather than by impression.
• It educates the community. Written and video material about housing, prevention and recovery, and first-hand accounts from neighbours who have lived it.

Everything here is checked before it is published

Listings do not appear on this site automatically. A provider or a neighbour submits one, a Task Force moderator reviews it, and only then does it go live. Providers are asked to confirm periodically that their listing is still accurate, because a listing that sends someone to a door that is already closed does real harm to a person who may not be able to make that trip twice.