The 12 summer camps run by the Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA) are struggling this year to accommodate the underprivileged children of Cambridge and Boston in the face of a souring economy and massive social service cuts in state and city budgets, the group’s leaders said.

Just as it was being deluged with an unusually high number of applications from would-be campers this spring, according to PBHA President Ayirini M. Fonseca-Sabune ’04, the organization discovered that municipal budget cuts would hit them in an area where they depend indirectly on public funding—the hiring of junior counselors for their camps. The salaries of these counselors, often former campers themselves, have traditionally been paid for by the municipal governments of Cambridge and Boston.

And PBHA Financial Administrator Barbara Cone said matters have been further complicated by the fact that the foundations on which their summer programs have traditionally relied for major funding proved less generous this year than they have been in the past.

Shaw Natsui ’05, the director of PBHA’s Chinatown Adventure Summer, said that his camp had been unable to hire as many junior counselors as usual this year due to a change in the age requirements imposed by the Boston Youth Fund (BYF) on the junior counselors whose hiring they pay for. Instead of hiring students between the ages of 14 and 17, BYF restricted its hires this year to those between 15 and 17.

Meanwhile, as legislators have shut down or severely restricted public-run summer camps, an influx of new applicants rushed to the PBHA summer programs this season, said Maria Dominguez, the organization’s deputy director.

“We don’t necessarily have the capacity to assume the programs closing around us,” she said.

The overwhelming increase in demand lead to outsized waiting lists, Fonseca-Sabune said—and, eventually, doors slammed closed to children wishing to attend PBHA’s camps.

“After a certain point, camps stopped accepting applications,” she said.

As a result, PBHA officials estimated, at least 300 children had been turned away from PBHA camps this summer—and Dominguez said that was a conservative assessment.

“That’s not counting the phone calls that come in later,” she said.

Searching for Solutions

The dire straits in which PBHA’s summer camps find themselves now did not come entirely as a surprise, said Dominguez.

“What you do is you keep an eye on the state budget,” she said. “We knew in November, December, January that something was going to happen.”

But even with such advance information—and knowledge of how past budget cuts had affected the organization—Dominguez said PBHA could not prevent the damage from the most recent round of cuts.

“I’d say it’s the worst it’s been in quite a few years, maybe a decade,” she said. “Things haven’t been this bad in a while.”