The second-floor apartment Carlos Feliciano found on a short, hilly street in Highland Park, Brooklyn, not far from the shelter where he and his family had been living, was supposed to be the start of their new life. It was, but not the way he expected.

Days after the move his wife, then 22, broke off their strained relationship in letters that she left on the kitchen table, he said. In one, she asked him to take care of their children: Atabeishka, Lennix and Lydiana, all under 6 then.

It was Dec. 19, 2007, more than a year after the family had moved to New York from Puerto Rico “seeking a better life,” he said. They had lived with relatives at first. Mr. Feliciano worked for nine months at a Fresh Direct food packaging plant in Queens, and the family moved to a basement apartment, but he injured his back and was unemployed for several months, he said. When the landlord asked them to leave, his wife suggested they move to the shelter.

Once he had moved into the Highland Park apartment and was bringing in a slim income, Mr. Feliciano had more immediate problems than wondering what had happened to his marriage. He needed a better job; the children needed a routine of food and care.

During the months that his marriage was in peril, Mr. Feliciano had learned to cook by phoning his mother for advice. Now his mother, Blanca Matias, left her home in the Bronx to stay with her son and grandchildren for long stretches.

The two-bedroom apartment began to fill up. The statue of Baby Jesus with its pink tunic and outstretched arms was fastened to the outside door; white curtains and a painting of a Caribbean scene were hung in the empty living room. An orderliness that even the play of three children could not undo became soothingly familiar.

Support came from the people and the services that helped Mr. Feliciano gain financial footing. Through WeCARE, an employment program run by the Brooklyn Bureau of Community Service, one of seven agencies supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, Mr. Feliciano used only a small portion of his income on rent, and committed to save 20 percent for two years—an amount that WeCARE would match for future housing expenses.

WeCARE helped him find work at Kennedy Airport as a driver and cleaner for $8 an hour. Though his home is not far from the airport, it was a tough commute: “I would get up at 3 a.m. to catch the J train and switch for the Q10 bus on 121st Street to be at the airport by 6 a.m.,” he said.

In August, Mr. Feliciano started a $9-an-hour job as a delivery driver for Howard Medical, a manufacturer delivering products throughout the city. And his food stamps have been increased to $549 a month.

This year, too, Mr. Feliciano brought order to his living room. The Neediest Cases Fund gave him $347 to buy a futon and two chests of drawers for his daughter Atabeishka, 6, and his son, Lennix, 3. Mr. Feliciano bought a third bureau with his own money for his 2-year-old, Lydiana.

Mr. Feliciano’s wife has reappeared. She visits the children once a week, he said.

In March, a family court judge gave him temporary custody of the children. Mr. Feliciano hopes he will win full custody this month because then he would be eligible for subsidized housing under Section 8, he said.

Mr. Feliciano, now 27, is optimistic about the future: “I want to study English, and I want to have a career.”

He is patient with his children, and this, too, is a conscious choice. “My father abused my mother; he hit her every day,” he said. “But I will never hit a woman. And I am not going to do to my children what my father did to me. I want them to have all the things that I could have had, but didn’t.”

Look around Joann Ritter’s apartment in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn and you will see an entire room of hand-me-downs. Her sister gave her the bed and the portable closet; her nephew gave her the television set; the microwave oven came from a neighbor who was about to throw it out; the kitchen chairs, she found on the street.

“Everybody tried to help us,” Ms. Ritter, 52, said the other day. “We had nothing — or less than nothing. We were sleeping on the floor.”

That’s because in March there was a mix-up with the city’s Housing Stability Plus program, which pays her $925 monthly rent. Her landlord did not receive the check that month and took all of her belongings from the home, crated them and put them on the street, Ms. Ritter said.

Ms. Ritter, who is unemployed, said that she came home to find the apartment emptied of its furniture. All of her clothes were gone, as were her three children’s clothes and all of their personal effects. The only things remaining were the air-conditioner and the washing machine, she said.

For help, Ms. Ritter turned to the WeCARE program at the Brooklyn Bureau of Community Service, one of the seven agencies supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. The Brooklyn Bureau gave the Ritters $399, which they spent on a daybed for Ms. Ritter’s son, Alvin Deas Jr., 11, and $250 for clothing for Alvin and his sisters, Al-Laysha Deas, 9,

“We were wiped out at that point,” Ms. Ritter recalled, adding that the rent mix-up was quickly resolved but that the belongings were lost for good. “We didn’t know what we were going to do.”

It had been a painful year. A month before, in February, Ms. Ritter’s mother, Francis Ritter, had died of heart failure. And Ms. Ritter, who has chronic arthritis, was still recovering from hip-replacement surgery and had lost her job at the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, she said.

In 2005, after losing her apartment in the Van Dyke Houses near Mother Gaston Boulevard in Brooklyn, she had to go with her children to a homeless shelter for a while.

But she eventually managed, with the city’s help, to rent the small apartment where they now live, in two sections separated by a dingy public hallway. Ms. Ritter lives in the first section with Al-Laysha, a student at Public School 145 and an avid reader of the Judy Moody books, and Alvin, a math whiz and a fan of professional wrestling who attends Intermediate School 349. Alicia, who has a job, lives down the hall in the other section, in a little nook behind a curtain near the kitchen.

Everything now in the apartment, Ms. Ritter said, came from somewhere else. Al-Laysha’s favorite books, including “The Cat Ate My Gymsuit” and “Amber Brown Is Not a Crayon,” came from a teacher at her school. Alvin’s cellphone was given to him by a relative. Only the apartment’s decorations — the pennant hanging from the ceiling in honor of Al-Laysha’s ninth birthday and the Hannah Montana stickers on the wall — were purchased by the family. Ms. Ritter picked them up at a 99-cent store.

Still, the Ritters manage, sometimes by ignoring or imagining away their surroundings. For Al-Laysha, reading is the best way to escape.

“Books are funny, and some are really interesting,” she said. “When I’m reading, I think I’m in the story with the characters.”

And, of course, the members of the family have each other.

“They didn’t take our lives,” Ms. Ritter said, “and they didn’t take our spirits. As long as we’re together, it doesn’t matter that we don’t have much.”

One day, she hopes for a house of her own and, with that, the permanence it will bring.

“That’s my dream,” Ms. Ritter said, “a place where nobody, under no circumstances, can ever, never, ever put us out.”

The Puerto Rican Family Institute referred Mr. Santiago to Project Moving On, a day treatment program at the Brooklyn Bureau of Community Service, one of seven organizations supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. The program worked with Mr. Santiago to manage his symptoms and to get specific about his goals.

A year later, Mr. Santiago enrolled at one of Boricua College’s two Brooklyn campuses, where he is relishing the pressure of schoolwork.

“It’s a good stress, not a bad stress,” he says. “If you don’t do your homework, you feel bad. If you do your homework, you feel better.”

The Brooklyn Bureau of Community Service drew from the Neediest Cases Fund to buy Mr. Santiago $200 worth of textbooks this year. At the time, his only income was $450 in Social Security; recently he began a full-time job as a security guard. He still shares an apartment with his mother in Bedford-Stuyvesant where he does not pay rent.

For the moment, though, he is engrossed in the curriculum at hand.

Because of college credits previously earned, he is on track to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in 2009. He has applied to Pratt Institute, where he hopes to get an associate’s degree in building and construction.

I work at a shelter,” a student in the back of the class at Boricua was saying. “And I think what we do is help people move up the levels.”

The professor concurred. “A lot of nonprofits are dealing with getting people from this level,” she said, pointing to safety, “to this level,” she said, pointing to esteem.

“Let’s talk about esteem,” she continued. “How many of you know someone who dropped out of school because they didn’t do well?”

Everyone raised a hand, a response that provoked a follow-up question from a woman in the front row, one seat away from Mr. Santiago.

“What do you call a person who maybe things don’t come easy to, but goes to school anyway and wants to move up the levels?” she asked.

“Somebody who tries,” the professor said.

From McBean, by way of Savannah, she arrived in New York at age 19, on the arm of Leroy Owens.

She had six children with Mr. Owens, who died in 1972, and worked as a home health aide until the car accident in 1994 that left her disabled. In 1997, she became a foster mother to her grandsons.

The two boys live with her and her daughter, April Owens, in a duplex apartment among a long row of drab, low-rise buildings. Her income does not allow for more than the basics. She receives $744 a month in Social Security, $196 per month in food stamps, and an additional $218 per month in public assistance for each child. Ms. Owens, 42, contributes to the $700 rent; $200 of which is subsidized.

Assistance from the Administration for Children’s Services and the WeCARE program at the Brooklyn Bureau of Community Service has been a huge help, she said. The Bureau is one of the seven agencies supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund.

Children’s Services provides Ms. Tanksley assistance in the home and tutoring for the boys. Marvin has learning delays and requires help with reading and homework, she said.

As the temperature dropped this fall, the Brooklyn Bureau was able to step in with $485.53 from the Neediest Cases Fund for shoes, pants, shirts and coats.

“I really appreciate it so much; I really do,” Ms. Tanksley said.

She says she knows that many older people look forward to life without the responsibility of children. But she would not have it any other way.

“I am here for them,” she said. “I pray that I get to see them get older.”

Simone Williams did not want to wear the Frankenstein boots.

“For real, they are Frankenstein boots!” Ms. Williams says, referring to some of the shoe styles marketed to people with diabetic neuropathy, a condition that causes her feet to swell and ache.

She needed something to wear on job interviews, though — shoes that would ease the soreness so that she could project capability and could focus on her prospective employers rather than her throbbing toes.

At the time, in 2006, making a good impression had never felt more critical. Ms. Williams, now 40, was coming off almost two years of unemployment and six months of homelessness, brought on in part by a bout of depression. She had years of professional experience in social service, not to mention a master’s degree, but was worried about explaining the gap in her résumé.

Drawing on the Neediest Cases Fund, the Brooklyn Bureau’s Transitional Living Community in July of that year bought her a $54 pair of orthopedic shoes that neither clamped down on her swollen feet nor offended her personal aesthetic: black Mary Janes.

Ms. Williams credited the shoes and the confidence they inspired when, several months later, she was hired as a peer advocate at the Baltic Street Mental Health Board, in Brooklyn.

“These shoes have taken me back to work again,” she said

But the job was a part-time, temporary position — one of many she would find with the continued support of the Bureau.

In May of this year, she was able to parlay all the part-time work into a full-time, salaried job: Ms. Williams is the program manager at Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York’s Beacon of Hope House, a housing program in the Bronx for mentally ill men and women.

When, after three interviews, Catholic Charities offered her the position and informed her of the salary — an amount that meant she could move out of a shared apartment and into her own, and resume paying off her student loans — Ms. Williams said nothing into the phone.

“Simone, are you there?” the woman finally asked.

What Ms. Williams wanted to say next: “Hell, yes, I’ll take it!”

Instead, she feigned calmness: “Yes, that sounds quite fine.”

Ms. Williams now thinks about starting her own nonprofit organization, a transitional-living program for 18- to 24-year-olds.

She is also working on her collection of subtly orthopedic shoes. It includes Timberland walking shoes, black pumps with a low heel and another pair of black Mary Janes.

Jose Corchado sat with serene ease in the offices of R.D.S. Delivery Service, surrounded by a makeshift exhibition of his art. He spoke slowly and softly as he described each detailed image—a sharp contrast to his boss, who spoke quickly about his employee’s talent.

“He’s a hidden treasure,” boomed the boss, Larry Zogby, the president of R.D.S., where Mr. Corchado has been a courier for nine years. “He just doesn’t have the skill set to knock on the right door and say, ‘Here.’ ”

Mr. Corchado, 35, has a learning disability, but he has mastered drawing in black gel pen.

He can rattle off a long list of comic-book characters and the actors who have played them.

“People say I’m slow,” he said, sounding not quite convinced. “I’m learning to get smarter.”

Mr. Corchado rejects a diagnosis from a school counselor years ago that he has an anxiety disorder, and the pride he takes in his artwork overshadows any disability. He has practiced his exact strokes since he was 12, and never uses color. He does not express much interest in creating characters of his own.

“My mom got me some toys when I was younger, and I was hooked ever since,” he said of the action figures. “There’s something inside of me.”

He attributes his gift to his father, who was also an artist but was absent for most of his son’s life. Mr. Corchado was raised by his mother in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, where they still live.

Previously, Mr. Corchado did odd jobs. He found his current job in 1999, through the Supported Employment program at the Brooklyn Bureau of Community Service, one of the seven agencies supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund.

Shy at first, he eventually warmed up to his co-workers, and soon became an entrenched member of the staff—he was even featured in a trade magazine for the industry.

Still, after years of delivering packages to the Upper West Side and the Bronx by train, Mr. Corchado wants to take the next step and work at the post office. That is one of a long list of goals. He would also like to study at the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art in Dover, N.J. But to commute, and to become more independent in general, Mr. Corchado says that getting a driver’s license is a priority.

“It’s time to be a man, to be out there and get places myself,” he said.

Eric Porter, his job coach at the community service agency, used $150 from the Neediest Cases Fund to pay for driving lessons and the driving test, which Mr. Corchado could not have afforded otherwise.

Mr. Corchado’s careful nature comes through as much when he talks about driving as it does in the painstakingly meticulous lines of his drawings. While he works on getting his license—he currently has a permit—he has driven short distances around his neighborhood a few times. He says he hates aggressive drivers and would not drink a drop of alcohol before getting behind the wheel.

Mr. Corchado has no siblings. His collections of comic books and toys kept him company throughout his childhood, and they continue to do so.

Of all the characters he admires, Mr. Corchado says he identifies with the darkness of Batman the most, but he also thinks highly of the life-saving drive of Superman.

“I wish he was real,” Mr. Corchado said. “He would have saved everyone on 9/11.”

Their eyes met over mashed potatoes.

Consuela Lewis was plating up fried-chicken dinners as a volunteer for an organization in Anchorage that serves free meals to children. Then she spotted Jerry Sails.

“I was like, ‘Who is this stud muffin?’ ” Ms. Lewis remembers.

When the cafeteria closed, Ms. Lewis, then 19, and Mr. Sails, then 29, hung around the recreation center and kept talking.

Mr. Sails had moved to Alaska from Georgia over two decades before when his father, an officer in the military, was relocated to a nearby base, Ms. Lewis learned. Ms. Lewis had moved from Brooklyn in 2003 to live for a while with her grandmother, Mr. Sails found out.

“Hope to see you around,” Mr. Sails said when they parted.

The following day, Ms. Lewis scanned the faces of strangers boarding the bus, hoping his might be among them. She did the same at McDonald’s, looking for him in the line of customers whose orders she took.

“He seemed like a kind person,” she says.

But months went by without a sighting. It was in November 2003, that she was sitting at a bus stop and noticed someone crossing the street in her direction.

“I seen this dude running toward me with his arms open and a big old Kool-Aid smile on from ear to ear,” she says. “I didn’t have my glasses on so I was like, ‘Who is that?’ ”

Then she realized it was Mr. Sails.

“Oh, my God, how you been?” she said.

“Just trying to keep warm,” he said.

They rode the bus together, made plans to meet the following day and soon began dating. Their first child, Je’Lani Lewis-Sails, was born in 2006.

In August 2007, Ms. Lewis was pregnant with twins when she got a call from a Brooklyn hospital that her mother, Sheridan Lewis, had been admitted with a severe flare-up of angioedema, a chronic condition that causes swelling in the airway.

“Your mother needs a caretaker,” the nurse said.

The following month, with next to no savings, Ms. Lewis and Mr. Sails managed to move to New York, where they slept on the floor of her mother’s living room in East Flatbush, Brooklyn until a vacancy opened up at a shelter.

Job prospects seemed unpromising, a strain soon compounded by the birth of their twins: a boy, Kami Lewis-Sails, and a girl, Kamalia Lewis-Sails.

After an emergency Caesarean, Ms. Lewis had to stay in the hospital nearly two weeks. One day, after she had trouble reaching Mr. Sails on the hospital phone, a social worker found her blinking back tears and referred her to the Bedford-Stuyvesant Family Center, a program run by the Brooklyn Bureau of Community Service, one of seven agencies supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund.

There it was determined that Ms. Lewis was experiencing postpartum depression. She started seeing a counselor weekly at the center.

The staff also helped her apply for benefits.

The family began receiving $463 a month in public assistance soon after, and, in October, moved into a house in Jamaica, Queens. All but $284 of the rent is paid for by the Department of Homeless Services. The Brooklyn Bureau of Community Service arranged for the family to acquire cast-off furniture and drew $94.98 from the Neediest Cases Fund for a safety gate and a playpen for the twins.

When the twins are not competing for real estate on his lap, Mr. Sails is looking for a job in every line of work in which he has experience: landscaping, snow-shoveling, janitorial labor, fast food and demolition.

When Ms. Lewis is not seeing to it that her mother gets her medication and minding her toddlers, she is often at the grocery store, maximizing the possibilities in $444 of food stamps. There will be no tree, but she plans to find a way to buy a cake for Christmas Day, the twins’ first birthday.

This time, what exactly cost him his job seems to him a bit indistinct, and far less spectacular. His employer, Superior Aircraft Services, lost its contract with JetBlue Airways in September. The new company hired some of Mr. Black’s co-workers, but Mr. Black was not offered a job.

Along with his $262 weekly take-home pay, Mr. Black lost a perk he had intended to take advantage of: a free standby ticket to anywhere JetBlue flies. While loading duffels, suitcases, skis and surfboards into an X-ray machine, Mr. Black — who has never traveled outside of Jamaica, where he grew up, and the New York area, where he moved at 19—had decided on Las Vegas.

“I wanted to see a place I’ve never seen before,” he said.

But that was the least of his problems. Instead of a seat on a westbound plane, Mr. Black is receiving $168 a week in unemployment. Fortunately, he said, his aunt does not require him to pay rent, so he is not facing eviction. But without work, his hope of moving to a place of his own is gone, and he worries that if a lung condition he suffers from were to flare up, he would not be able to pay his doctor bills.

Mr. Black turned to the Supported Employment program at Brooklyn Bureau of Community Service, an agency that has provided him with periodic assistance since 1998. The organization, one of seven supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, helped Mr. Black apply to have Medicaid coverage, which had inexplicably lapsed, restored. It also drew on the fund to supply him with $204 in clothes for wearing to job interviews: pants, a blazer, several dress shirts and dress shoes.

The bureau is now helping in Mr. Black’s search for work, an effort that over the past few months has not yielded many promising prospects. The dismal employment market feels curiously like that of 2001, Mr. Black says.

“There wasn’t another 9/11,” he said, “but it seems like there’s a lot of people that’s out of a job right now.”

In an interview in his mother’s living room, in a housing development called Hope Gardens, Mr. Figueroa said that though his mother had eased the transition, his return had been hard. It was strange to live at home again. “This is my mother’s space,” he said.

On the living room walls, pictures told two stories: of Mr. Figueroa’s life before he left New York decades ago and of the things that happened while he was away. There was a picture of his brother Robert, wearing his National Guard uniform, and pictures of Robert’s children, who barely knew their father. There was a family photo, taken on Long Island. There was a picture of Mr. Figueroa’s son, also named Luis.

But recently, things have started to look up. Mr. Figueroa, seeking help to find work, was referred to WeCARE, a job-training program run by the Brooklyn Bureau of Community Service, one of seven agencies supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. Through the Brooklyn Bureau, he was able to resolve a simple problem: his commercial drivers’ license from Florida was not valid in New York, and he was hard-pressed to pay to transfer the license. With help of a $95 grant from the Neediest Cases fund, he was able to transfer it, and in August, he found a job driving handicapped and mentally ill children in Brooklyn.

Mr. Figueroa, who attends regular Narcotics Anonymous meetings, said he was focused on regaining his family. Of his son, he said: “We’re trying to establish a relationship. It’s been hard.” He also said he was reaching out to his nieces and nephews. “I wanted to tell them why my brothers weren’t there for them,” he said.

He had been lost, he said, but had gotten lucky and was able to turn his life around. “We’re all human,” he said. “Some of our personal stories are more intense than others.”

When things get too bleak inside Martin Lotto’s mind, he pulls out his greasepaint, paints his face and becomes his cheerful alter ego, a clown named Guess.

As Guess the Clown, Mr. Lotto, 45, visits hospitals, senior centers, beach front boardwalks and subway cars, blowing up long balloons and twisting them into animal shapes.

The grins that meet Mr. Lotto’s balloon animals, and his jokes, help blot out the thoughts that began stalking him 24 years ago. On Sept. 23, 1984, Mr. Lotto’s fraternal twin brother, Richard, was found dead of a gunshot wound inside the Lottos’ family home in Brooklyn. The mystery of how he died was never solved, and pushed Mr. Lotto into a black hole of depression that he has never fully escaped from.

Mr. Lotto grew up in Flushing Meadows, Queens, and in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. He was born with poor eyesight; his optic nerve was damaged during birth, robbing his left eye of sight, destroying his peripheral vision and, later in his life, leaving him legally blind. Mr. Lotto finished part of high school and worked as a school bus driver, despite his eyes, and as a clerk in pet stores.

But after his brother’s death, Mr. Lotto began using street drugs to blunt his grief, with the ultimate goal, he said, of killing himself. But he survived, learning how to cope, fitfully, with suicidal thoughts and severe seizures that doctors said were brought on by stress. In 1994, his father died, and, Mr. Lotto said, his mother and older sister moved to Michigan, leaving him to fend for himself.

That year, Mr. Lotto learned of a new venture called MetroClub, a program in Downtown Brooklyn for people with mental illnesses. Its clubhouse, which is run by the Brooklyn Bureau of Community Service, one of the seven agencies supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, provides a nurturing setting for psychiatric rehabilitation. It has proven to be Mr. Lotto’s salvation. He was one of MetroClub’s founding members, and became deeply involved with the daily rhythms of the clubhouse, planning monthly menus and recommending members to prospective employers.

“This is my home,” Mr. Lotto said one recent afternoon at

Mr. Lotto also crochets blankets — a skill he learned from his mother — for homeless people. In May 2006, after five years of working toward it, he earned his high school equivalency degree. And, in February, Mr. Lotto was honored by a Brooklyn member of the City Council, Letitia James, for his work in a citywide sneaker drive; the rubber soles were to be used to fix basketball courts ruined in Hurricane Katrina.

“Even though I have disabilities, I don’t let them take over me,” said Mr. Lotto, who takes 13 medications daily for his depression, his seizures and, now, diabetes. “Even though I have struggles, and even though they try to take me down, I don’t let them.”

One day, also in February, Mr. Lotto got a call at MetroClub. A fire had ravaged the roof of the single-room occupancy building in Downtown Brooklyn where Mr. Lotto has lived for the past 14 years. Mr. Lotto’s room is on the top floor; some of his belongings were destroyed, and his clothes reeked of smoke. He applied for, and got, $100 from the Neediest Cases Fund to pay for his laundry bills and buy new underwear, along with two MetroCards.

Yet more trouble lay in wait. Mr. Lotto had begun seeing spots in his right eye, his good eye, and in October he underwent laser surgery to repair the culprit, a torn retina. It left Mr. Lotto all but sightless, unable to read or use a computer, and heartbroken. He started using a cane to walk but stopped after somebody threw a beer bottle at him.

“My outside world is like a cloud,” he said. It is not certain, he said, whether his vision will eventually improve, though he hopes so.

In the meantime, Mr. Lotto remains devoted to his community service, and to MetroClub, which he walks to three or four times a week, navigating the 12-block route from his home by memory. He also holds out the dream of one day working for the New York State Lottery.

It would be, Mr. Lotto said, an obvious and perfect fit.

“I always say, ‘Don’t play me, play the Lotto,’ ” he said, with a grin.

Shatara Nieves is awakened by her mother at 6:30 a.m. She takes her 1-year-old son to day care before arriving at the Brooklyn Bureau of Community Service on Schermerhorn Street, where she takes part in a food-service training program for learning and developmentally disabled adults.

She washes her hands, puts on a hairnet and ties on a plastic apron before getting to work.

“When I first started I was nervous,” said Ms. Nieves, 22. “I didn’t know what to do.”

Now, after about six months of training, she feels at ease in the long, narrow kitchen. She can scramble and fry eggs and make toast, and knows how to properly present a meal on a plate before giving it to the customer. “Now I feel great,” she said.

Ms. Nieves is one of nine employees of a cafeteria that is operated by clients for clients. Their instructor, Herma Markland, who has managed the cafeteria for eight years, teaches them the importance of punctuality and to work together: collaboration is important in a kitchen. They also clean the grills and the refrigerated cases, and wash all the dishes.

On average, the cafeteria workers prepare 100 to 150 hot

But the cafeteria is not just a training ground for aspiring foodservice workers; it is also part of the agency’s goal of improving the lives of its clients, most of whom have a psychiatric or developmental disability. A hot, nutritious meal at the bureau’s first-floor cafeteria plays a crucial role in keeping people healthy and stretching scant incomes a little further.

Those in the Day Habilitation program, which offers vocational training and skills required for independent living, and those in Project Moving On, which offers counseling and support, receive vouchers for the meals, but those in workshops and a skills training program pay $1.75 per meal.

A comparable lunch — consisting of a hot entree, a piece of fruit and a beverage — would cost three times as much outside the bureau, said Daniel Giuseffi, coordinator of skills training.

The menu varies; on a recent Wednesday, the staff was preparing baked chicken wings and macaroni and cheese. “We have a focus on wellness,” Mr. Giuseffi said. The cafeteria follows state and federal nutritional guidelines. “We are getting more and more away from fried foods,” he added.

Sensitive to the clients’ limited means, Mr. Giuseffi strives to keep the cafeteria prices low. But this past year, with the rise in food costs, the $7,000 monthly budget was falling short. The cafeteria is not subsidized by the government and does not make a profit. It seemed Mr. Giuseffi’s only choice was to raise the prices for the meals.

Then the Brooklyn Bureau of Community Service came up with a solution: The Bureau, one of the seven agencies supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, decided to draw $350 a month from the fund to cover the increase in costs.

Michael Montgomery, who has been a client in Project Moving On for the past four years, is thankful that prices remained unchanged. “My money is tight,” he said. “It really helps.”

Even a small increase might mean that some patrons would choose not to eat, Mr. Giuseffi said. “Nutrition is an important part of education. By providing an affordable meal, it really gets their day started right.”

In 2005, Ms. McBroom moved to her current apartment. It was then that Terance, who had always been shy and quiet, began to show signs of mental illness. She had an especially close bond with Terance. Ms. Mc- Broom urged him to join her at the clubhouse, which she was attending weekly and where she found help for her mental illness.

On the weekend before Mother’s Day, Ms. McBroom said Terance took her shopping and filled the freezer with food. She recalled cooking fried shrimp and French fries, his favorite meal.

She awoke to the sound of sirens. While she was sleeping, Terance had jumped from the eight-story housing project building. When she came outside, his body was still on the sidewalk.

“I don’t know how in the world he did that,” said Ms. McBroom, looking away. “I loved that boy; he was my baby.”

Ms. McBroom received support from the members and staff of the clubhouse and from the Bethlehem Baptist Church, where she sings in the choir. “I thought I was going to end up in the hospital after Terance died,” Ms. McBroom said. “I kept saying, ‘I got to get through this, I got to get through this.’ ”

In late July, Ms. McBroom began her current position. As part of the support for the job program, participants are given a small amount of money for emergency carfare, in case they are running late. She also was given money toward a uniform at her previous job at McDonald’s: $70 in all from the Neediest Cases Fund.

The Virgin Megastore in Times Square is scheduled to close in April, but as part of the program, she is eligible to apply for another job after her current one ends. Ms. McBroom said, “You know, people say ‘You’re the best greeter here.’ And I can’t believe that, but that’s what they say.”

Soon after Elijah’s birth, Ms. English started having heart palpitations and body tremors. She was jittery. She would wake up exhausted, then have short-lived bursts of energy. After she left the shelter, her symptoms got worse. Doctors thought the problem was psychological and prescribed anti-anxiety drugs.

A year went by. The symptoms persisted. Then an endocrinologist diagnosed a thyroid disorder.

Encouraged by knowing what was wrong, she resolved to go back to school, enrolling in classes at La Guardia Community College in 2005. Then her thyroid condition got worse, and she dropped out again. Her weight fell from about 125 pounds to less than 100.

All the while, she worked various jobs and went on and off welfare.

On a recent evening at her apartment, Ms. English sat on the floor going through a handful of financial documents. The living room was bare except for a folding chair, a little compact disc player and an artificial Christmas tree in the corner.

After losing a teacher’s assistant job — the day care center where she had worked shut down — she entered WeCARE, a job-training program run by the Brooklyn Bureau of Community Service, one of the seven agencies supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund.

Through WeCare, she enrolled in a home health aide training program. After completing the program, she was hired as an aide, working part time and earning about $140 a week.

On Nov. 29, she achieved her goal of getting off welfare. Her rent is $1,350 a month; her Section 8 voucher covers all but $150.

Ms. English recently received about $500 from the Neediest Cases Fund to buy furniture: a bed for Elijah so they no longer would have to share her futon, and a dining table and chairs so they can eat together.

“I’m not going to play victim and say that this or that is the reason why I am in the position I am in. You have to take responsibility,” Ms. English said. “There were some things that I could not control. But I’m a mother, I have a son, and I’m no good to him if I’m not together mentally.”