Shawna Gurley, MPA

Director of Emergency Housing Services

Shawna Gurley serves as FrontLine’s Director of Emergency Housing Services, providing oversight of Coordinated Intake, North Point Temporary Housing, Supportive Services for Veteran Families, and Cleveland Mediation Center. In this role, Shawna’s leads and directs a team of 50+ staff to ensure its focus on the Housing Crisis Response programming for persons experiencing homelessness.

Shawna is a social change agent who is passionate about ending long-term generational crises and improving the quality of care and life for others. She became committed to this work more than twenty years ago when she received utility assistance from a social service agency in southern Ohio. Blown away by how impactful and meaningful this support was, Shawna immediately signed up to volunteer with that organization. She soon secured paid positions of increasing responsibility assisting low-income families to meet their basic needs. 

Shawna’s extensive experience in the social service field includes supporting women to maintain sobriety; outreaching women returning to the community to help them re-acclimate after spending time in jail; managing data entry systems such as the Homeless Management Information System; leading a Life Skills team in Transitional Housing Services at the Hitchcock Center for Women, Inc.; and serving as a Program Manager at the Norma Herr Women’s Center and North Point temporary housing.   

In 2014, Shawna was featured, alongside her sister, on the second season of the Food Network’s Food Court Wars; from 2021 to 2023, she served as General Manager of the Modern Southern Table restaurant in Columbus—a restaurant her sister launched after winning the Food Court Wars competition.   

Shawna currently serves on the Office of Homeless Services Public Policy Committee and has experience as a harm reduction trainer. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and Criminology, with specialization in law enforcement technology and African-American studies from Ohio University, and a Master of Public Administration from Walden University.