Our Kind of Neighborhood 🌈

June is Pride Month, and in Rochester that means a downtown full of color, music, and people showing up exactly as they are. Rochester Pride Fest is one of our favorite days of the year — and this time, we got to be right in the middle of it. We came with a plan: build a neighborhood.

Family Promise Rochester booth at Pride Fest 2026

Our booth, "The Neighborhood," was a big rainbow skyline — apartments, duplexes, townhouses, single-family homes, the works. We handed people a card and a marker and asked them to do one simple thing: draw your family, then pin it to the neighborhood. No categories to pick from, no boxes to check. Just your family, however it looks, finding its place on the map.

By the end of the day the skyline was packed — every kind of family you can imagine, all sharing the same block. Honestly, it's the best summary of our mission we've ever managed to fit on a wall.

We also ran a spin-the-wheel trivia game that got competitive in the best way (there was a buzzer; things escalated), where folks could test what they knew about housing, homelessness, and FPR while walking away with a prize and a few myths busted.

And yes — Homey made a debut.

If you haven't met Homey yet, Pride was the big reveal. Homey is our panda, and the logic tracks: pandas are famous homebodies who do their best when they've got a safe place to land — fitting for an organization built around keeping families housed. Homey collected an extraordinary number of hugs and handled the spotlight like a pro.

Yes. Every family.

That was our line all day, on our shirts and over our booth, and we mean it without an asterisk. Whoever makes up your family, whatever it looks like — when you're facing homelessness, our door is open. Pride felt like the right moment to say it plainly, because for LGBTQ families, that promise isn't a given everywhere they turn.

Some of what the research tells us about LGBTQ families specifically:

• Money is tighter, more often. Children raised by same-sex parents are more likely to grow up in poverty — roughly 20–24%, compared to about 12% of children with different-sex parents. About 22% of LGBT adults live in poverty overall, with parents among those hit hardest. Scholars Strategy NetworkNational Council on Family Relations

• Stable housing is harder to reach and hold. Same-sex couples are significantly less likely than different-sex couples to own their homes — one of the clearest predictors of long-term housing stability. Williams Institute

• The door isn't open everywhere. Roughly 1 in 4 transgender people report experiencing housing discrimination because of who they are — a barrier that follows whole families, not just individuals. CLASP

Most of this traces back to discrimination in jobs, lending, and housing — not to anything about the families themselves. None of it is inevitable. They're barriers that can be lowered, and lowering them is the work.

Come find us.

Whether you're a family who needs support, someone who wants to pitch in, or a person who just really likes hugging pandas, we'd love to know you. Thank you, Rochester, for a Pride that reminded us how big this neighborhood really is.