She was trying to care for her two young children while she took college courses in paralegal studies so she could reinvent herself in the workplace.

She felt torn between the need to nurture her children and the need to provide a secure future for them. She was miserable.

Then, her son's teacher told her about North Light Community Center in Manayunk, one of those ancient, weather-beaten, neighborhood safe havens built around basketball courts worn smooth by thousands of children, running through the years toward young adulthood.

Founded decades ago as settlement houses serving the needs of immigrants, the longtime members of the Federation of Neighborhood Centers remain homes away from home for thousands of Philadelphians - even while they suffer from a steep drop in charitable funding during the ongoing recession.

The federation lost $4 million in fiscal 2008, said its director, Diane Cornman-Levy, which forced 30-year-old Frankford Group Ministries and 25-year-old Southwest Community Services to close, leaving 8,000 people without youth programs, life skills classes, emergency services, and food cupboards.

The surviving 11 member agencies are struggling on shoestring budgets, rescuing families like Chanel Broadus' even as they themselves search for a lifeline.

Today, three years after she hit bottom, Broadus, 32, has her bachelor's degree and a good job.

"I couldn't have done this without North Light," she said on a recent afternoon, standing in the center's sun-splashed playground on Green Lane near Wilde Street, while her children - Bryce, 8, and Jade, 6 - enjoyed an after-school break on the play equipment.

For the three years she studied law and worked in a law office, Broadus said, North Light staffers - from the neighborhood residents who've been there for decades to the Villanova University student volunteers who are a steady presence in the afterschool program - cared for her children in extraordinary ways.

When Jade was having a rough time adjusting to first grade, North Light's associate director, Arte Verbrugghe, who dryly describes himself as "a grump working on being a curmudgeon," talked with her every day for weeks until she adjusted.

Verbrugghe said he played both good cop ("Hey, Sweet Pea, you having a bad day?") and bad cop ("That behavior is unacceptable!") with Jade until he helped her work through her stress, and she went back to being her sweet self.

"If you have a critical need, trying to get through the [social services] system is almost cruel," said Executive Director Irene A. Madrak, who has been at North Light for 30 years.

"Here, we provide a huge safety net for families directly, one on one," she said. "No child, no family is ever turned away."

North Light suddenly saw its 68-year relationship with United Way of Southeastern Pennsylvania severed when that agency "radically changed its historical mission and decided to narrow its focus," said Board President Jane Lipton.

But although North Light, which has been helping Manayunk and Roxborough residents since 1936, lost the almost $80,000 of its operating budget that United Way provided, it remains true to its mission of offering families everything from afterschool education and recreation to job skills to a food cupboard to summer camp.

"There have been times when we've wondered, 'How are we going to pay the electric bill?' " Lipton said. "But guess what? We're still here, kicking and scratching. And that's a thing of beauty."

The heart and soul of North Light is Director Madrak, a Manayunk native who grew up playing softball up the hill on Kendrick Recreation Center's cinder field.

"You really had to want to win to even think about sliding on that field," she said, laughing. "It really hurt. After the game, you had to scrub the darn cinders out before they became a permanent part of your skin."

In the late '70s, Madrak, a recreational therapy major at Temple University, arrived at North Light for the first day of her 500-hour senior internship, was assigned to the game room, met a 10-year-old kid - short hair, freckles, braces - and said, "Hi, what's your name?'"