“Just because the resources aren’t there doesn’t mean the family goes away,” says Rhianna Williams, Program Assistant for Family Partnership at Reuben Lindh Family Services. Williams is part of an in-home program that works with families who have open child protection orders. She works from a spacious, pleasant converted school in Phillips that also houses a Native American child services program. When I interview her, the first floor of the building rings with the sounds of small children at play. The upstairs meeting room and counseling center where we speak is a converted classroom with a refrigerator for staff lunches and a rocking chair for a teacher or counselor.

Reuben Lindh provides in-home parenting training, budgeting assistance and therapy to a client base that is heavily but not exclusively low-income. Staff members help parents deal with age-appropriate discipline, nutrition, cleaning, communication and day-to-day stress. “A lot of times these parents are so overworked and burnt out that they don’t even think about these things,” says Williams.

The budget crisis means an increase in pressure on vulnerable populations, she adds. Low-income families are working more hours. Money is tighter. Social services programs that used to take the pressure off are less available or gone. While domestic violence is never acceptable, she says, stress and lack of resources contribute to abuse when frazzled parents face too many crises.

Programs for children with special needs are particularly likely to feel the pinch, Williams adds. “When there’s a tighter economy we have less money for school systems. The first thing that gets cut is special needs. A lot of our kids have behavioral problems … they’re acting out and the teacher doesn’t know how to handle it.” Funding cuts have reduced the number of after school programs for families, as well as programs that keep kids busy and safe after school is out.

Ayers echoes Williams’ concerns about the harm a tight economy can do. For GLBT youth who do not have strong family support, “the economic pressures are pretty intense. I know youth who are working multiple jobs. If they lose one aspect of that financial stream, they become homeless.”

Funding cuts and increasing need create an alarming crunch. Of organizations surveyed by the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits in 2003, 58 percent saw a rise in demand for their services. However, only 48 percent of surveyed nonprofits were actually able to increase the number of clients they served. Demand for nonprofit services exceeds supply, and demand is growing. Sixty-three percent of nonprofits surveyed expected increased demand for services in 2004.

One statistic in particular reveals how nonprofit resources are stretched: 66 percent of nonprofits report that there is no other source of services for clients that they turn away. Especially outside the metro area, whole counties or regions may be dependent on only one nonprofit.

Economic pressure limits what can be provided. For Reuben Lindh, this is primarily a matter of time: the hours that caseworkers can spend with clients, the amount of time that they can hold cases open. Because of the budget crunch, says Williams, “we’re not allowed to keep cases open as long as we’d like.” Workers keep more of an eye on the clock, she adds. “What does this family need and what can we do for them—within these time restraints?” Economic pressure also means that Reuben Lindh can take fewer referrals for services.

Reuben Lindh family workers are mandatory reporters; if they see child abuse, they must call the reporting hotline so that a social worker is notified and meets with the client. While abuse is reported immediately, the social workers themselves have less time and take longer to meet with clients.

For at-risk familes, long-term support is important. A sustained relationship with a family worker provides a point of stability in the midst of stress. It’s an easy way, Williams points out, for a client to know what a stable relationship looks like. When staff is shifted around or a family is moved from service to service, families must make new relationships. It takes energy to connect, Williams says. “Having to do that repeated times is draining on anybody.”

Nonprofit staff members tend to be dedicated people, and a budget crisis puts its own particular strain on them. Overtime, pay freezes, unpaid vacations and the difficult responsibility of laying off hard-working, effective program staff all take their toll. “Before,” says Williams, “we had the time and the funds to do in-service days and teambuilding days. This is a potentially high burn-out job.” Williams says Reuben Lindh staff try to do small things to preserve morale, like making sure everyone gets a card or flowers on their birthday.

When asked about staffing and budget cuts, Ayers speaks of a “painful loss” to District 202. Stress, she says, “sort of eats at people … I have already been directed to reduce operating budgets, lay off staff, have staff take pay cuts. I’ve heard of 10 percent pay cuts [among nonprofit employees]. I’ve laid off an administrative assistant and now we have a volunteer three days a week. There has been a program director laid off … there is a very personal sense of loss in the youth community.”

With layoffs, the network of human services staff is threatened. Ayers talks about struggling to make referrals to other organizations which are themselves short of staff and money. When District 202 staff members refer GLBT youth, they want to know that the person on the other end of the referral is supportive of GLBT issues. For vulnerable people, a good referral is a lifeline—the counselor who knows GLBT issues, the doctor who knows that South East Asian immigrants have specific cultural concerns—and a bad one means a traumatic encounter, a useless appointment, or even a client who decides to give up on seeking help.

Williams says that referring clients for state services has gotten harder. “A little more phone tag, a little more e-mailing,” she says. “Less face to face.”

Two directors of environmentalist nonprofits are a bit more sanguine about their situations. Both Whitney Clark, director of Friends of the Mississippi, and Marie Zellar, the Minnesota State Director for Clean Water Action, feel that their organizations have weathered the storm, not without difficulty. Each, however, talks about overall problems funding environmental programs and the need for new strategies.

Clark says that when the economic downturn began in 2001, Friends of the Mississippi was “surging” as an organization, which he attributes partly to the newness of its projects. The nonprofit, he says, has a host of untapped foundations and potential donors, unlike some older organizations that had already identified and worked with most potential sources of funding at the time of the downturn. These organizations would then have no new source of revenue if an old one failed.

However, he says that “we’ve never fully funded environmental needs” in Minnesota. “Some of our policies are actually encouraging degradation,” he continues, citing increasing suburban sprawl with its attendant pollution. The water table is in danger from build-out, says Clark, because as we cover the ground with concrete and drive cars all over it, polluted rain falls on the concrete and then runs off in large, intensely polluted amounts. “Over the long term we are systematically under-funding, causing the slow—sometimes not so slow—degradation of the state’s environmental quality.”

Zellar also expresses concern for Minnesota environmental funding, particularly in reference to the Clean Water Act. “I think that our state agency has been severely crippled by lack of support from the state level and funding cuts from the federal level, not to mention the political climate,” she says. She adds that “the more funding is under attack, the more sheepish they [the Minnesota EPA] become.”

For Zellar, one of the roles of CWA is to pressure state agencies to live up to their responsibilities, especially in a time when the “regulated community” of businesses that may produce pollution has an unusual amount of strength. The fines and fees paid by the “regulated community” fund the EPA’s enforcement programs. Lobbying in Minnesota has kept those fees low, effectively “shrinking the agency” says Zellar. The Clean Water Act is “a very big hammer,” and she wants to pressure the EPA to use it effectively.

Both Zellar and Clark say the post-September 11 political climate has actually encouraged individual giving. “There’s a really cool kind of camaraderie out there,” says Zellar, because of CWA’s commitment to political change. She says that although “it’s just really apparent that things are really tight for [donors] financially, they really want to do something.” They realize, she continues, that “the situation is dire.”

Friends of the Mississippi and Clean Water Action have both done a great deal of work with other organizations, as well as taking on contracts from other entities. She says that a commitment to long-term planning “and luck” have meant that “whole worlds of new opportunity” have opened up to the organization.

Even though Clark and Zellar speak with confidence of their organizations’ future, both return to the dangerous under-funding of environmental protection. With budget cuts shutting down environmental protection initiatives, here will be no shortage of work for Friends of the Mississippi and Clean Water Action.

Zellar is excited about CWA’s response to a tighter economy. In search of a more stable source of funding and an expanded connection with members, the organization hopes to get up to 50 percent of its funding from its membership in coming years. “Foundations are at the whims of the stock market,” she says. In addition to shifting emphasis from foundation funding to individual donors, she says that CWA has been building itself into a mobilization center, an organization that can take on contracts for allied organizations and produce a successful phone bank, fund raising campaign, voter mobilization ... “something that’s really bad-ass.”

Cuthbert describes the current situation as a “crucible ... what does not kill you makes you stronger.” He says that small, under-funded or disorganized nonprofits may not emerge from the current economic situation. Those that make it through, he says, have a chance to “boil down” to their core values. Stronger arts businesses may emerge, “because people are having to focus on the bottom line.”

Still, when asked about how the state’s funding cuts reflect its priorities, he says, “I sometimes wonder what the vision of some people is ... where they think we’re trying to go as a society.”

Cuthbert is about as optimistic as circumstances will bear. But one of the organizations that may not make it is District 202. “If the funding climate continues to be as challenging as we think it will, we have a cash reserve but we will eat it up,” says Ayers.  “We are an amazing organization, and the positive impact of this community center in young GLBT people’s lives is tremendous. We are changing the way the center operates so we have a stronger chance of weathering the new economic realities. If we don’t change, and if the community does not support us, then we would face having to close late next year.” ||