Sloane Davidson Wants to Welcome You to the Neighborhood

PHOTO BY MARTHA RIAL

Recently, Sloane Davidson’s husband and son read LeBron James’ biography. In it, James asserts that what people are passionate about from ages 13 to 19 is likely what they’ll be passionate about when they’re older.

Her family got to talking about what she wanted to do when she was a kid. “From 13 to 19, what I was really passionate about was building community and helping nonprofits,” Davidson says. “That was literally what I cared about.”

Davidson, who for the past 10 years has run the nonprofit Hello Neighbor, which provides welcome and numerous services for recently resettled refugees in Pittsburgh, remembers walking by the Children’s Institute on her way home from school, stopping in, and asking how she could volunteer (she ended up helping with swim rehabilitation for kids).

As a high school student at Shady Side Academy, Davidson says, “I had this idea that everybody should give back, and that a lot of times, people just don’t know where to start.”

She dreamed of a designated day where students could choose a volunteer opportunity; it became the school’s first Day of Caring. In 2016, Davidson, who lives in Highland Park with her husband and two sons, started Hello Neighbor in response to rising anti-refugee sentiment. She invited a recently resettled Syrian family to Thanksgiving dinner, which sparked the idea of pairing Pittsburgh families with new refugee families.

“It was a moment in time,” she says. “It was a moment when people were really looking for something to hold on to.”

Today, Hello Neighbor has a staff of nearly 50 people; rooms in its offices are named for the countries where its staff members were born. An average of 1,000 clients a month from more than 65 countries are enrolled in Hello Neighbor’s programs and it has served more than 4,000 refugees, immigrants, SIVs (those with Special Immigrant Visas) and asylum seekers.

Kristen Hemmings, vice president, financial advisor, at Coghill Investment Strategies, is vice-chair of Hello Neighbor’s board. She started volunteering with the nonprofit in 2017 after scrolling through horrific headlines about the Syrian refugee crisis while on maternity leave. She attended a Hello Neighbor event at the Green Tree Public Library to do a craft with resettled refugee kids.

“We were in a room with so many cultures and so many languages being spoken, but there was so much joy, and kids are the same [from any culture],” she says. “I thought this was such a special way of approaching the refugee crisis. You want to provide services, but you also want to provide connections.”

PHOTO BY MARTHA RIAL

Hemmings praises the team Davidson has created at Hello Neighbor.

“When you walk into headquarters, there are different cultures, religions, languages … it is a picture of what the world could be when you have people coming together.”

Last year, Davidson was chosen as one of 10 L’Oréal Paris’s 2025 Women of Worth, an awards program that selects notable women from around the world who embody service and innovation through nonprofit leadership. She was the first winner from western Pennsylvania in the program’s 20 years.

“I felt like representing this region and representing a refugee and immigrant organization was such a big honor,” she says, noting L’Oréal Paris donates $25,000 to each nonprofit it honors.

This year, Davidson served on the NFL Draft Advisory Board as a member of the NFL Draft Source Program. She was impressed with the NFL’s commitment to reserving 51% of its contracts for local businesses owned by minorities, women, veterans, LGBTQ+ or people with disabilities.

Davidson’s connection to the NFL started through former Steeler Larry Ogunjobi. Ogunjobi, who has Nigerian roots, helped Hello Neighbor host a dinner in 2024 with 200 Hello Neighbor clients at the August Wilson African American Cultural Center. Ogunjobi purchased gifts for the kids, and immigrant-owned restaurants catered the event.

Through that, she got to know the Steelers’ community/social impact team and talked to them about Hello Neighbor’s procurement policy — they only purchase from places that match their values, places that are local, and/or places that invest in them.

“There’s a lot of ways that people start initiatives and become activists and support nonprofits,” Davidson says. “For me, it wasn’t a drastic left turn, it wasn’t an investment banker who found God.

“When I first started Hello Neighbor, I didn’t care if it caught on or not. It was just something I felt called to do. And then once it did start to catch on, I had to put on my leadership pants pretty quickly and figure out how to scale it and what to do.”