In a letter earlier this week, Mayor Vince Gray warned President Obama that, if the District’s budget continues to be frozen by the federal government shutdown, “very soon there will be severely negative consequences for us.” But for some agencies, the bad times are already here.

Sasha Bruce Youthwork, a nonprofit that offers housing and services to homeless youth, announced in a release yesterday that it will furlough 46 full-time employees and turn six into part-timers because of the government shutdown.

Founder and executive director Deborah Shore explained that the shutdown is a perfect financial storm: They are without federal funding and the District won’t sign pending contracts for non-essential services. “So we have to stop providing services,” she said.

While Sasha Bruce Youthwork does accept donations, they would have to be “really immediate and really large” to offset the damage done by the shutdown, Shore said.

“We just feel like the responsible thing is not to count on a windfall like that,” Shore said.

For the time being, services that provide homeless youth with food, AIDs testing and pregnancy prevention have been cut.

This will mean closure of 6 programs which provide street outreach to youth who are homeless offering food, clothing and access to shelter; after school programming for youth which both feeds and tutors young people; AIDS prevention and testing; evidenced based teen pregnancy prevention services; assistance to youth seeking jobs; and supports to youth who have recently aged-out of the foster care system. There are an additional 12 young people who are employed on a part-time basis as Peer Leaders who will be furloughed. These youth rely on their work to support their transportation to/from school, to buy school supplies and clothing. Some of them contribute to their families for rent and other basic necessities.

Shore said the “terrible decisions” were made based on what they consider essential services. “Because we’re an organization that fully half of the provision of services that we do is to young people who we provide housing for and young people who have no where else to go, we determined those to be essential,” Shore said. “We’re trying to maintain all of our residential programs.”

So this means many “critical” community services have been shuttered, save for the ones that have a “guaranteed stream of funding.”

Shore said this is the first tier of cuts made because of the shutdown. “We’ll be tracking this really closely, because if we don’t have enough money to maintain our residential program, then I feel like we are completely in chaos in this world,” Shore said. “To be sending kids that have nowhere to go out into the streets would be horrific.”

The decision about the next tier of cuts will be made by early next week, as they wait to see if they can get money from outstanding invoices.

“We know that a lot of the federal funding is not coming,” she said. “But we thought that a lot of the District’s funding is coming, but we don’t know that for a fact. We don’t have absolute certainty that invoices that are currently being considered by the District government agencies are going to get paid out in time for us to make our payroll or pay our rent or these things that are our obligations.”

Shore said the District government has “tried to do the right thing,” but since the shutdown has gone on so long, it’s not clear who they’ll be able to pay.

“It’s really sad to be furloughing people,” she said of her “fabulous” staff who have worked “like crazy to make sure there’s the least amount of disruption.” But still, the disruption is there.

“We are in communities where sometimes you’re the only person that is standing next to a family or a young person who’s having a really hard time,” Shore said. “To pull away like this – we’ve never had to do it before.”

Shore said they work in communities where there aren’t a lot of alternative places to turn. This is of course made even worse in D.C., where local funding is tied up because of the shutdown.

“A lot of our funding is funding that in any other city or state would be absolutely flowing to us and to everybody in the District,” she said. “It’s like we’re a department of the federal government. … I guess we’re just not essential by definition. We can’t even spend our own money.”