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As hard as things are, Interfaith Works and our legion of more than 140 congregations, 60 corporate partners and 7,000 volunteers are not walking away from neighbors in need.

More than 30,000 men, women and children receive assistance from us each year and 95 cents of every dollar we receive is on the front line serving our community. We share the responsibility of sheltering the homeless, providing clothing, school supplies, baby layettes and household goods to income-qualified families, mentoring vulnerable families and stanching the bleeding with cash assistance to alleviate hunger, prevent evictions, and provide prescription and utility assistance.

The failing economy is being felt at every level. Needs are growing and revenues are reduced. Just as you are making important choices in your lives, we have to make choices at Interfaith Works. The level of need in Montgomery County is growing exponentially:

-Use of Interfaith Works clothing centers has increased 48 percent since a year ago.

-Calls for utility and rent assistance have increased by 50 percent in the last six months.

-More than half of the 65 women at our Wilkens Avenue shelter are first-time homeless.

-Our family caseworkers are finding empty refrigerators and babies with raw bottoms because the cost of food and diapers now exceeds family incomes.

-The food stamp caseload grew from 16,000 in fiscal 2007 to 27,000 in 2008.

-Child abuse referrals increased by 200 in October, to an all-time high of 800 calls.

-Manna, our community food bank, has experienced a 48 percent increases in families served — 1,400 families from January to September.

The people we serve are our neighbors, living in poverty in one of the richest counties in the country. They are working poor families, vulnerable and disabled adults and children, seniors on fixed incomes, and now, new victims of the recession.

The federal poverty level for a family of three, an adult with two children, nationally is $17,600. To live without subsidies in Montgomery County, that same family needs $62,000 — therefore most families who struggle are ineligible for federal aid programs such as food stamps, Medicaid and free and reduced-priced meals at school. The sense of unfairness, and fear, is boiling over into a potential class war that is cause for worry.

At Interfaith Works, we are the safety net for our neighbors in need. This safety net is groaning under the weight of the middle class, collapsing on the working poor, who are collapsing on those with the least. A family is short on rent one month because the utility bill was higher than expected; medication costs used the monthly budget for food; work missed because of a sick child leaves the hourly wage worker short on pay, or hours were reduced, or a job was eliminated … so the cycle continues.

We are seeing families who were making it, whose lives are now in tatters. I think of one loyal donor to Interfaith Works who lives in a comfortable home. Her husband lost his job. She has a part-time job and they have four children, one in college. With hopes for the future dashed, she now asks where to find health care, how to get help with utilities, and how does she overcome the shame of having to ask?

And then there is one young student whose family we've helped, who last March arrived at school and tearfully begged his teacher to make sure his bus driver knew the way to his shelter house. His mother had lost her job and they were no longer allowed to stay in their home. How would the bus driver know where to take him, if he couldn't take him home? Today the boy and his family are in an Interfaith house, and the bus driver knows where he lives.

Our work is an act of leveraging: leveraging dollars, volunteer time and skills, energy and desire. We work at the edges, stretching and struggling to find that place where fiscal responsibility and community needs are met. We are simply going to work as hard as we can, with what we have, to improve the lives of those who come to us in need.

Becky Wagner is executive director of Interfaith Works,

formerly Community Ministry

of Montgomery County, a

nonprofit coalition of more than 140 member and affiliated

congregations. This column was excerpted from her remarks at last month's annual "County Companies Caring" breakfast.