CAN CHARITY FILL THE GAP?

SIX YEARS AGO, RANDY ENOS WAS A cook in Brooklyn, making $10 an hour. Then he and the mother of his son Joshua split up, and Randy's own mother died. He felt a terrible void and decided to move. A restaurant-association hot line touted jobs in California, so Randy packed up Josh and went there. But the jobs didn't materialize, at least not at $10 an hour. Randy ended up washing cars at a garage in Glendale. As the work was seasonal, he got behind on his rent and one day received an eviction notice. "The scariest part," says Enos, 33, "is that if I hadn't found a place to stay, child-welfare services would probably have taken my son away from me.'' One shelter he tried accepted only women and children. But then he got lucky: he and Joshua were taken in by Gramercy Place Shelter in Los Angeles.

Gramercy, it turned out, is more than a room and a bath. It provides job training and counseling on issues from drugs to family planning. It arranged special tutoring for Joshua, who is in second grade, and even located a Cub Scout troop for him. Randy could earn "shelter money" to buy necessities, while 80% of his $490 a month from Aid to Families with Dependent Children (afdc) check was set aside by the Gramercy staff to build up some savings so he can move out and start paying rent on his own place. That will happen within two weeks, when he will return to his Glendale job and expects to train as a forklift operator. "I feel I have been blessed," Randy says, "with people here who have helped me out."

But for families such as the Enoses who hit bottom next year or seven years from now, Gramercy Place may not be there. It is a program of Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles, which, like many large private charities, makes up a major portion of its multimillion-dollar budget from government grants for everything from special education to alcohol treatment to emergency housing. Much of this money could disappear because of proposed federal budget cuts. Sharon Demeter, who runs the shelter, tries to imagine what she would cut first if the money were to dry up. First the education and job-training programs would go, then the caseworkers, who make crucial one-year follow-up calls to be sure the shelter's graduates are still doing all right. "The prognosis has always been fabulous for the people who come from this shelter,'' she says. But, contemplating the future, she is worried that "this place will have to shut down, completely shut down."