By all estimates, Forest House would not survive 1960. The Bronx settlement house that had helped build new public housing, launched a health center, provided day care to hundreds of families, convened neighborhood meetings on racial integration and offered after-school art classes during the 1950s now found itself struggling with financial mismanagement and lackluster fundraising from a beleaguered board of directors. United Neighborhood Houses, the umbrella agency for all settlement houses around New York City, looked likely to close it.
The problem was not that Forest House had no money, it was that the nonprofit had no flexible money. The settlement house had secured $150,000 in City and state grants and contracts to help underwrite programming for 1960, but government regulations limited funding for overhead expenditures required to run an organization. Forest House needed $15,000 to pay for things like rent or a bookkeeper — costs not covered by a government grant but without which the nonprofit could not function. As the board president of United Neighborhood House, Stanley Isaacs, explained, Forest House’s services “are literally essential to the area, but would cease if Forest House did not exist as an administrative agency, to supervise and carry on the work involved.”