The Littlest Victims Of the Mortgage Crisis

Freddie Mac posted third-quarter losses of $25.3 billion and asked for $13.8 billion of the $200 billion the government has set aside to salvage Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Between the Freddie Mac corporation and foundation, Washington area charities have received more than $250 million since 1991, $45 million in 2007 alone. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have consistently been rated the top two corporate givers in the region. So other agencies depending on the funding share Mason's worries.

"There's a tremendous amount of anxiety," said Chuck Bean, executive director of the Nonprofit Roundtable of Greater Washington. "When I talk to my peers, the frequent phrase is: 'What's your Plan B?' 'How will we keep our shelter open?' 'How will we cut our day care?' 'How will we turn people away from our food bank?' There are a lot of us who are working on contingency plans."

Judith Dittman, who runs Alternative House for young homeless mothers in Northern Virginia, said she had budgeted $50,000 from Freddie Mac, as she has for the past four years, but also has heard nothing. Freddie Mac funds make up 14 percent of the organization's budget. "I'm holding my breath," she said.

Ditto for Judith Sandalow, executive director of the Children's Law Center in the District. Although the law center received its $100,000 in May -- Freddie Mac typically has two board meetings a year to approve grant requests of more than $50,000 -- a smaller organization that Sandalow works with, Foster and Adoptive Parent Advocacy Center, which depends on the foundation for a quarter of its budget, is also waiting to hear.

"Freddie Mac has been a stable and reliable funder," Sandalow said. "Good and thoughtful foundations, when they change their focus, give a year or two of warning to their grantees so they can begin to change their funding sources, because very few organizations can replace 25 percent of their funding that quickly. Best-case scenario: We scale back, help fewer people. Worst case: We close."

Maryland's Advocates for Children and Youth received $115,000 in the spring grant cycle. So for now, Executive Director Matthew Joseph is not worried. "But in early March, if things are still stalled, I think we would start hitting the panic button."

At the Child and Family Network Center, tucked into a warehouse behind the Birchmere music hall in the low-income Arlandria area, Mason is already panicking. As the economy has slowly soured during the past two years, donations have dropped, and she has cut accordingly. She once ran preschools in nine high-poverty locations. Now there are six. She once taught more than 200 children and assigned three teachers to every classroom. Now she has closed five classrooms, laid off seven teachers and has only two teachers per classroom.

That particularly stings, she said, because all the teachers, like Parada, were once mothers who received services from the center, who later were trained, received associate or bachelor's degrees and turned their lives around. Two social workers left and have not been replaced, boosting caseloads from 40 families each to 62.

"It's like being Solomon," Mason said. "There's so much need, and who do you cut?"

Down the hall, Joeli and her classmates sang a rousing round of "Bringing Home a Baby Bumblebee." Another little girl pressed her nose to the classroom window, her breath leaving a splotch of fog on the glass. She's one of the 104 children, Mason said, on the preschool's waiting list.