Summer Appeal 2025
Dear Friends,
The weight of the moment is real. Every day brings new headlines – rollbacks of civil rights, criminalization of poverty, attacks on our most vulnerable. It’s exhausting. It’s enraging. And it’s exactly why NEOCH exists, and why we refuse to back down.
As we enter Pride Month, we especially name the impact these attacks have on LGBTQ+ people – particularly trans community members and queer youth, who we know are disproportionately pushed into homelessness. These aren’t distant policy debates. They’re direct assaults on the people we serve every single day.
And yet, in the face of it all, we are moving forward – together.
Thanks to your support, NEOCH’s work isn’t just continuing; it is growing in impact. So far in 2025, we’ve helped 82 people move from unsheltered homelessness into housing. Our ID Crisis Collaborative delivered over 5,000 vital documents – opening access to jobs, housing, healthcare, and more. We partnered with tenants in more than 15 buildings, supporting their fight for dignity, safety, and community power.
We helped launch Cleveland’s Home for Every Neighbor initiative, housing 115 people in just five months – with NEOCH leading the Street Outreach. And when bitter cold hit last winter, our team moved quickly to secure emergency hotel stays, saving lives in the process.
This is what solidarity looks like.
This summer, we’re growing to meet the moment. We’ve welcomed a new cohort of passionate interns, expanded our volunteer network, and deepened our education and advocacy campaigns – bringing the fight for housing justice into classrooms, public forums, and policymaker spaces. At the core of it all is our commitment to elevating people with lived experience – investing in their leadership, organizing power, and voice.
While government and foundation grants help fuel our infrastructure, it’s the 1-in-6 dollars from individual donors that keep our work rooted in community. Private contributions – like yours – give us the flexibility to act quickly, speak boldly, and stay accountable to the people we serve.
We know what’s possible when we move in solidarity. From placing people in hotels during extreme cold, to securing permanent housing through trusted relationships, to organizing tenants – Our victories are shared with you. Every step forward happens because people like you refuse to look away and instead show up with support and solidarity.
We need you more than ever. Your support helps us fight for housing justice that is bold, inclusive, and rooted in compassion. Please consider making a financial contribution today to help us keep showing up and never back down.
In Solidarity,
Chris Knestrick (he/him)
Kait McNeeley (she/her)
The Creative Rationale behind our Summer Appeal 2025
Hello! My name is Kathryn Boor (she/they). For those who do not know, I am NEOCH’s communication coordinator, and I am the one who is in charge of our social media, website, and emails. I also have a graphic design background, and I work on any of our branding and visual designs when I can! I also love art and spend my free time outside of the work I do with NEOCH painting, crafting, and illustrating. Everything I make has a creative rationale and symbolism around my choices. I thought that it would be fun to include some of the thoughts behind the summer appeal artwork.
So, before I make the piece, I meet with our team and pull important messages I would like to represent. Before our Summer Appeal, we created the motto in our Annual Report, “solidarity over everything.” We continued to talk about the importance of solidarity in a time of civil unrest caused by the current administration in our Summer Appeal. We ask for help from our community so that we can continue to serve those who need it most. Once I have a general idea of the feelings I want to convey, I pull lines and ideas to turn them into symbols.
For example, a few lines from our summer appeal:
“Our victories are shared with you. Every step forward happens because people like you refuse to look away and instead show up with support and solidarity. We need you more than ever. Your support helps us fight for housing justice that is bold, inclusive, and rooted in compassion.”
Pairing these lines with our motto, “solidarity over everything,” I need to illustrate NEOCH’s desire to uplift the community through a hands-on approach. We want to show how NEOCH’s work is rooted in compassion and the support and solidarity that is needed to continue our work.
I wanted to illustrate that “rooted in compassion” and how we need to be interconnected. You can see this with the overlapping hands but also the ivy circling around them. Ivy symbolizes fidelity since when it attaches to something, it won’t let go of it easily. The ivy is paired with a lotus flower that symbolizes compassion, transformation, and the ability to grow in harsh conditions. Both plants are resilient and despite their conditions, they look beautiful.
I wanted to show how we need one another in trying times. No matter what, we will come back full circle to need our friends, family, neighbors, and community members. Humanity is an ecosystem that thrives through compassion and collective care. We need to nourish our connections with one another with radical love and action. Each hand is different and brings a unique perspective that uplifts our community.
In the center of the hands, there is a lotus inspired flower in a rainbow. This is partially due to the fact that June is pride month. Pride this year has been shared with the fight to protect people from ICE and continuing the fight against rolling back policies that directly harm queer and trans individuals. Each hand shares the flower with equal responsibility to carry, protect, and share our love, compassion, and resilience.
Overall, I wanted to create something beautiful that shows the love for our amazing community that fights for the right to thrive. Everyone deserves a place to properly bloom.