Estes Valley Crisis Advocates hasn’t taken a direct hit from the government shutdown—yet. But it’s just a matter of time.

“We’re very aware of where we’re at and when that’ll run out,” says Diana David Brown. Brown is the executive director at the domestic violence shelter, which also provides emergency response services in Estes Park, Colorado. “There is a point where we would have to start looking at cutbacks in hours and layoffs. That’s probably the end of this month.”

The organization is the only crisis domestic violence shelter in the area, run by four full-time employees, two part-time employees, and volunteers. “It’s full all the time,” Brown says. Estes Park is a tourist town, at the base of Rocky Mountain National Park, so the center comes to the aid of the thousands of visitors who flock to the area every year, for everything from responding to tourist fights that involve domestic violence to counseling services for unexpected deaths. But its budget relies heavily on federal grants; just a small share of its funding comes from private donations, given the small year-round community in which it exists.

The shelter is already feeling some effects of the shutdown. It recently got approval to use grant money to get new equipment to Skype with legal experts in the closest cities (which are about 40 miles away). And its heating system is outdated and old, at risk of breaking down and forcing the organization to relocate shelter residents to hotels, but the application it put in for grant money to update it is from a fund that’s frozen while the government remains shuttered. They've put all these plans on hold until the shutdown comes to an end.

“I just don’t know how long programs can hold on at this point.”

Nationwide, programs like the ones that Estes Valley Crisis Advocates operate are desperately waiting for reimbursements to come through—money that was set aside for them last year but hasn’t arrived yet, explains Cindy Southworth, executive vice president of the National Network to End Domestic Violence. “This is money that shouldn’t be locked up,” she says. But because the employees who work at the Department of Justice who release the funds were furloughed, the checks couldn’t go out. The DOJ was able to bring some employees back to work to process the payments on January 7, but that is a band-aid at best. The department has told providers that it has enough money carried over from prior years to flow funds only through January 17. It’s also not clear whether enough DOJ employees are back on the job to process all of the frantic requests for reimbursements.

“We’re literally days away from them running out of federal funds,” Southworth says. Unlike federal employees who can be made to work without pay if they’re deemed to be essential, many states have laws that won’t allow shelter staff to work or even volunteer their services without pay. “It may mean shelters closing down, hotlines going dark,” she says. “Local organizations are terrified. They’re crunching the numbers, they’re watching. They’re seeing exactly how long can we hang in there and at what point do we have to start shutting down.”

Such an outcome is almost sure to have devastating consequences. When Southworth was new in her career and staffing a hotline, she picked up a call one day from a little boy whose mother had sent him to a neighbor’s house to supposedly get some flowers. He told Southworth that his stepfather was holding his mother hostage and had said that if police showed up at the house, “he’ll kill the police and kill himself and the whole family,” she recalls. Southworth was able to contact the mother and come up with a plan: Because the mother had a medical condition, she convinced her partner to take her to the hospital. Southworth reached out to the police, who went to the hospital disguised as doctors. They were able to get her and her children away from the abuser, and that evening they booked the family into their shelter.