Beginning with a vision in the late 1970s, a group of mental health workers, social service personnel, local law enforcement, court officials, attorneys and staff of the YWCA in Ashland sat down to consider the solutions to the ever-increasing problem of domestic violence within their own community.

Reeling from national media attention received from a 1979 Lou Harris Poll conducted in the Commonwealth that revealed that 78,000 women in Kentucky admitted to being physically beaten or assaulted by their partner in the previous year, attention was drawn to Kentucky's desperate need for services for battered women and children, and in particular to families living in Northeast Kentucky.

Soon after in 1983, Pathways, Inc., a community mental health center, was granted funds to provide counseling and legal services to victims. Immediately, the toll-free number was flooded with emergency phone calls from women who needed temporary, safe shelter. With Pathways' vast resources in the 10-county regions known as FIVCO and Gateway, Safe Harbor became an "umbrella" agency with financial assistance from the Cabinet for Human Resources and technical support from the Kentucky Domestic Violence Association, opening an Emergency Shelter in downtown Ashland in 1983. Not long after, victims and their children flocked to the safe house. It became apparent the modest facility was inadequate to meet the needs of victims throughout the FIVCO district.

Safe Harbor's initial innovators went back to the drawing board and, once again, obtained a lease on a 40-room facility from the Commonwealth. Staff and volunteers collaborated to renovate, making the facility habitable by January 1985. Ashland Oil helped provide the finishing touches with some badly needed financial resources of furniture, curtains and linens. Women were ready to move into the newly painted rooms. In the fall of 1989, Safe Harbor opened another shelter in Morehead, Ky., known as Doves. In the years that followed, the Morehead shelter thrived, and on July 1, 1993, became an independent, private, non-profit organization.

Today, Safe Harbor of Northeast Kentucky, Inc., has evolved into the largest domestic violence program across Northeastern Kentucky, providing legal, medical and educational advocacy as well as a holistic array of services for battered women, men and their children while becoming this region's leading expert and clearinghouse for domestic violence services.