As he led those gathered for the Homeless Memorial in prayer, Rev. E. Regis Bunch called the need for the annual gathering an indictment of the “apathy that allows our folks to freeze in the shadow of luxury developments.”

“We refuse to accept the lie that poverty is an accident or that homelessness is a force of nature,” Bunch said Monday afternoon. 

He also had a call to action, asking if everyone in the packed meeting room had picked up one of the handouts that described looming cuts to federal funding for housing programs on one side and the phone numbers of Ohio’s U.S. senator on the other.

“Power concedes nothing without a demand,” Bunch said.

The Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless (NEOCH) has organized the memorial since the 1980s, always around the winter solstice, the longest night of the year. The focus is on reading aloud the names of Greater Clevelanders who died that year while experiencing homelessness. There were about 170 names on the list on Monday, and some in attendance called out the names of others.

That’s roughly double the number from 2024. (The U.S. “experienced an unprecedented rise in homelessness” in 2025, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness.)

“And I am scared to death that there’s going to be a lot more names next year,” said Anita Cook, president of the NEOCH board.

She referred to the expected changes in requirements and priorities in federal funding for services for homelessness. In November the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development announced plans to shift funds away from permanent housing and toward short-term programs. Ten thousand households in Ohio, and 3,600 in Cuyahoga County, could be affected, according to NEOCH.

HUD postponed the changes amid legal challenges, so it’s not clear if they’ll take effect in 2026.

Chris Knestrick, executive director of NEOCH, called the annual memorial “a tough day in our community, but a very important day.”

“For people without a safe place to sleep, winter does not arrive gently,” he said. “It exposes a truth that is deeply painful, that in our community, people have died not because of inevitability, but because of the violence of poverty, because housing is treated as a commodity instead of a human right.”

He urged everyone to call Sens. Bernie Moreno and John Husted to ask them to advocate for maintaining current funding levels for at least another year.

“Long-standing, successful programs are being destroyed,” Knestrick said, “not because the work has failed, but because people in Washington do not value life.”