CATCH Neighborhood Housing

CATCH Neighborhood Housing is a community-based affordable housing organization that has been serving Merrimack County, New Hampshire since 1989. CATCH's mission is to strengthen our communities by creating opportunities for permanently affordable, quality housing for people otherwise not being served. CATCH has three main programs: 349 high-quality, affordable rental apartments; HOMEteam NH, a regional collaborative home buyer and home owner education and counseling program, including first-time home buyer education, foreclosure counseling and financial counseling; and Alliance Asset Management, a property management, asset management and financial services provider for CATCH and other affordable housing owners in the region.

Our vision is creating communities where every person is confident of a home.

Goal One: Strengthening our affordable housing portfolio through developing new housing opportunities and maintaining our existing homes

Goal Two: Increase community outreach and communications to engage more donors, community leaders, and ambassadors in CATCH’s mission

Goal Three: Invest in the infrastructure and and capacity of CATCH, including the training of staff and board, collaboration and community partnerships, and technology to ensure efficiency and security

CATCH has made it a priority in our strategic plan to ensure leadership development for staff at every level. As we come out of the pandemic, staff are encouraged to attend trainings, especially the highly-regarded Training Institutes coordinated by our national partner, NeighborWorks America. Our new President & CEO is also emphasizing training as a new leader and is seeking out opportunities as well.

COVID-19 struck fear and uncertainty in all of our hearts in a very real physical and emotional way. Never before has our organization shut its doors for weeks at a time, but even through the darkest weeks, our team never stopped working, housing families, and going above and beyond to ensure the CATCH wheels kept turning. As we’ve seen, the housing challenges in our community have only gotten more extreme since March 2020, and we are more determined than ever to make more equitable communities where every person has opportunities for safe, affordable, quality housing. Despite everything, our team has not only kept the wheels turning but has adapted, restructured, and expanded numerous programs and resources. Over the last year and half, our pop-up food pantries, fresh market visits, hybrid fundraisers that brought music and holiday joy to hundreds of our neighbors, and our newest development, Rosemary’s Way, which will soon house 42 families right in the heart of Penacook, kept our hearts focused on our mission. We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the loss of CATCH’s longtime leader, Rosemary M. Heard, in late December 2020. Her daily perseverance, dedication to residents, and love for her community is something we continue to channel in everything we do. She might be gone physically but we look forward to dedicating Rosemary’s Way in early 2022 to ensure her legacy lives on forever. Our community opened so many doors for us – whether it was a grant to support our operations, funding for technology support to enable us to work virtually and keep data secure, funding and food donations for our food pantries, training for our staff to keep up with financial supports and new programming for our residents, hand sanitizer donations and PPP for our maintenance staff, and countless other invaluable contributions. Despite all the challenges, we are so grateful to all of those who helped us get through everything and build our resiliency.