Philanthropists Barbara and Al Siemer Help Students Succeed by Providing Stable Housing

For the past 20 years, a tenacious New Albany couple have quietly invested in the potential of children by stabilizing families. Between 2011-2022 alone, they assisted nearly a quarter of a million children across the country by helping at-risk families with school-age children stay in their homes.  

This work has had a huge impact—and you’ll have a hard time finding many other Central Ohio philanthropists who’ve done more—but Barbara and Arnold “Al” Siemer remain relatively unknown in the region. That’s by design, with the couple preferring to shine the spotlight on the people and organizations who are using their funding through their nonprofit, the Siemer Institute, to work directly with families in need. Barbara Siemer calls that the “hard work.” 

In fact, Kim Habash Dorniden, president and national director of the Siemer Institute, who has worked in the nonprofit sector in Central Ohio for nearly 15 years, had never heard of the Siemers or their organization when she interviewed with them three years ago. “I think that the Siemer Institute and the philanthropic work of Barbara and Al is probably the best-kept secret in Columbus, if not the nation, because their level of giving is phenomenal,” Habash Dorniden says. 

In total, between 2018 and 2022, the couple through the Siemer Institute invested more than $35 million in stabilizing families throughout its network, which grew to 70 major cities this year. If you add on state and federal funding and mandatory matching funds from nonprofit partners, the investment totals over $95 million over that period, according to the Siemer Institute’s 2022 Impact Report. 

“Our motivation really is to help people who are on the bottom rung of the economic ladder,” Al Siemer says. “We really want to help people who are down on their luck, so to speak. The ones that need help to stay in their home, get an education, get a chance to be successful.” 

While the institute has existed since roughly 2003, Barbara Siemer has long cared deeply about education. She was once a high school English teacher and after-school tutor for disadvantaged children on Cleveland’s West Side. In 1968, Barbara married Al—the founder and CEO of the Desco Corp., an industrial conglomerate—and she transitioned to being a stay-at-home mom. Or rather, as she puts it, “I stopped earning money for teaching,” still remaining an active presence as a classroom volunteer for both their daughter, Elizabeth, and son, David. 

The family moved to Worthington in 1983, and she began volunteering with programs aligned with her values. The programs included I Know I Can (which helps children in Columbus City Schools achieve post-secondary education goals), the Homeless Families Foundation (now known as Home for Families, which provides homeless prevention and re-housing, education and stability programming), the Community Shelter Board (which champions the issue of homelessness) and Congregational Outreach Ministries Program of Assistance & Social Service (known as COMPASS, which works with other faith-based organizations in the community to prevent homelessness and encourage self-sufficiency). “The [COMPASS] program had very little money,” Barbara recalls, and only one staff member. “It was probably the strongest force for the institute because I just kept thinking, if we could just do more for [the clients], but more importantly, if we could just work with them.”  

The Siemers began collaborating with the Columbus Foundation in the early ’90s, and by the end of the decade, they were learning more startling facts about the damage “mobility,” or moving homes frequently, had on school-age children. Not only do children miss weeks, if not months, in the transition between schools, but their presence in a new classroom causes a disruption, especially for the teacher, who must spend time assimilating the child into their new environment.  

After relocating part-time to Sarasota, Florida, in 1999-2000, the idea behind the Siemer Institute began to coalesce in Barbara’s mind. Al was traveling for work four days a week, leaving Barbara, who was an incredibly active volunteer in Columbus, “sitting there twiddling my thumbs, thinking I don’t know what I’m going to do with my time” in the Sunshine State, she says, laughing. Then, working through the United Way, to which they’d become donors, she had a thought. “For 30 years, what I had wanted to do was start a program to help people get their feet very firmly on the first rung of the ladder out of poverty,” she says. Housing stability, she realized, was that step. 

She soon learned that while Florida, which had one of the largest homeless populations in the country at that time, had many programs to help homeless people, there was nothing to prevent it from happening. And that became her mission, along with finding an agency that could administer the program. She tread water for two years, she says, trying to work with the schools in Florida before having a lightbulb moment. 

“The schools aren’t the problem; the families are where the problem starts,” she explains. “Our average is 2.8 children per family we work with. So, if we work with the family, we’re getting three children stabilized.” And the costs of stabilizing a family in their home is tens of thousands of dollars less than getting a homeless family back into a home, she adds. 

They piloted a program in Sarasota through the United Way, with the couple providing guaranteed $50,000 funding for three years for all fixed expenses. They also required the United Way to raise matching funds. Participating families followed it for an agreed-upon time frame (most families work with the program for 6-18 months, Dorniden says), collaborating on mutual goals that help ensure long-term stability. 

The Sarasota initiative expanded to a $450,000 program in five years—just at the moment the country was plunging into a national recession in 2008. With help from local United Way chapters, the Siemers expanded the program into five more cities in Florida. And then they went home, enlisting United Way chapters from some of Ohio’s biggest cities: Columbus, Youngstown, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Toledo and Dayton.  

And since that time, they’ve built a national program that currently partners with United Way branches in 70 cities across the country. “The great thing about the Siemer Institute’s program is that they know that it’s not necessarily a one-size-fits-all model,” says Lisa Courtice, president and CEO of United Way of Central Ohio. “We all have shared metrics and outcomes. Our goals are the same, but how we go about doing it, there’s a lot of flexibility in that.”   

Locally, some Siemer Institute funds go to the YMCA’s Stable Families Program, which empowers families to maintain stable homes by “intentionally focusing on school stability, secure and appropriate housing and increasing family engagement … to promote long-term family success,” according to its website. Each year, the program serves 2,500 children in 1,000 families. 

“What we love about the Y is the reach it has throughout the community,” Courtice says. In Central Ohio, the program has a 99 percent effectiveness rate of avoiding a move for a family during the school year, she says, reeling off other metrics and benchmarks used to gauge success that the Columbus program eclipses. “The outcomes are really kind of remarkable.” 

Local Impact

In fall 2022, the lease on Kiara Gholson’s apartment expired. And then the engine on her car “blew up.” Without a support system that could help her get to and from work, she found herself spending most of her paycheck on Lyfts and Ubers just to maintain employment, which left her and her toddler son couch surfing. She was connected to the Siemer Institute Family Stability program through Columbus-based partner Physicians CareConnection during an intake interview when she sought pre-natal care in November of that same year. 

“You know you don’t actually expect them to help; they just say it and give you a resource for a shelter or something,” Gholson says, adding that she was surprised when she was then connected to the program and contacted by a case worker. 

The program helped place her into a home and funded temporary shelter while she waited to move in, as well as transportation assistance to and from work. The program even included a meeting with a lactation consultant, which led to Gholson landing a new job as a breastfeeding peer advocate with WIC, the federal supplemental nutrition program for women, infants and children. 

“It worked out perfect,” she says while waiting to pick up her 3-year-old from daycare. “I breastfed with my last son, too, so I was pre-educated; I knew about it a little bit.”  

Gholson’s new job, which she started in September after giving birth to her second son in June, affords her more flexibility and stability, especially as she works through some health complications. While she still worries about affordable housing and maintaining her stability when she leaves the program, she’s thankful for the opportunity it has given her to buy necessities for her children and even save a little. “I’m just trying to figure out after the program is over what are the next steps to make sure I’m not going backwards again,” she says. 

That’s the entire reason for starting the Siemer Institute, Barbara says. “It’s crisis intervention. Don’t let the crisis alter the course of their lives because something unforeseen and uncontrollable has happened to their family that they can’t help.”  

The Siemers recognize the good fortune that has put them in the position to be able to help others and have passed that attitude on to their children. The couple plans to give the bulk of their estate to the Columbus Foundation to continue the work they began some 30 years ago. 

“We have given [our children] everything that we feel is good for them, and then everything else is going to try and level the playing field for families who are not so similarly fortunate,” Barbara says. “Al has earned everything he’s ever done, and I have been blessed beyond my desserts. I never dreamed that I would live in this world and be able to do what we’re doing. But we are now dedicated to making sure that other families who have not been that lucky have a chance.”  

This story is from the December 2023 issue of Columbus Monthly and the Winter 2024 issue of Columbus CEO.