Throughout Nebraska and across the country, some organizations that provide essential services to at-risk populations are at risk themselves, facing potential federal spending cuts.
And as they try to develop different ways to keep their doors open and services running, many of these organizations continue to count on cooperation with county governments.

Hope Crisis Center provides support and, often, safety, to victims of domestic violence, sexual assault and human trafficking in five Southeast Nebraska counties. In 2024-25 they organized more than 1,300 nights in shelters and answered more than 4,000 hotline calls for potential victims in the region, including in Jefferson County, which makes up about 8.4% of the served population.

"Once they come into a shelter with us, we help them find new housing, and then we help pay to get them into that new place and start over," program manager Mindy Burns said. "[We help them with] anything that they need to get them to their next step in life."

Referencing cases like the Jamie Hagen murder in Seward earlier this year, executive director Carmen Hinman said 2025 has already been a violent year across the state, which adds even more urgency to the work Hope Crisis Center strives to do. 

"We have more murder/homicides than we’ve had in a long time in just a very short time into the beginning of the year," Hinman said. "It is happening, it is continuing to happen, it’s scary, for whatever reason, it’s been more than the norm, and it’s sad to say ‘the norm,’ but at the end of the day, that is the reality of the work that we do."

Though an amendment to a bill this year helped the organization secure some state funding through Medicaid, federal funding through programs like the Victims of Crime Act has steadily dwindled over the last few years, a trend they expect may continue.

"From four years ago we are down 50% from that pot, that has been a huge deficit for our organization," Hinman outlined. "It’s been cut at the federal level, and so our national providers continue to lobby for us at those levels to hopefully get that pot of money back up for us. Things are super crazy and scary, and with our new administration, things are looking potentially even scarier for us, so we continue to fundraise and do what we can to bring money into our organization to continue services."

That's a sentiment that has been felt by many other social organizations throughout the state, including locally in Southeast Nebraska, where Blue Valley Community Action has a wide footprint, helping provide services related to food, education, healthcare and housing to more than 8,000 low-income people across Southeast Nebraska in 2024.

Federal support for the Head Start early education program was in jeopardy earlier this year. Now, CEO Shari Weber says she's "feeling much better about" the likelihood of that money, which makes up 60 percent of their overall budget. Now, they're focusing their advocacy efforts at maintaining funding for a specific federal grant that's at risk of elimination, one that supplies funds they can apply to a lot of different areas.

"It’s not a large amount of money when you look at our overall budget, but that is the core funding that we are able to use to support those programs that meet the needs in our community, the supplemental food program for one, and it also supports our emergency services," Weber told the Jefferson County commissioners Tuesday. "So if those funds go away, we would have to make some pretty drastic changes with our emergency services. I’m assuming we would be available fewer days in each one of our counties, so if that happens you might have more people coming to you asking for help. We will do everything we can to serve them as best as we can, but that’s going to make some changes for us if that funding goes away."

Weber said BVCA's annual budget typically runs between $13.5 and $14.5 million, and about $363,000 of that comes from this Community Services Block Grant funding. A small portion of the pie, but one that is very fluid, and one that is very much at risk of being "zeroed out," knocking out that revenue source for all community action groups in the state, not just this one - which is why their advocates are working to "make noise" at the national level to ensure others are aware of what this money can be used for. 

"That’s the tricky part about the CSBG funding is it’s such a small amount, that our advocate at the national level is afraid it’s going to get overlooked," Weber said. "If you look at Head Start funding, that’s a huge amount, and there were a lot of families, parents, community members that advocated for it. Well, community service block grant is so unique, it’s kind of hard to understand how it supports all the programs."

BVCA has a call with U.S. Senator Deb Fischer about this subject lined up this week. 

In all, as Jefferson County braces for its annual budget evaluation process, BVCA requested $5,800 from the county for the upcoming budget year, an increase of $98 from last year, while Hope Crisis Center requested $7,678, a figure that has remained fixed for the last four years.