As a 24-hour operation, the Crisis Nursery of Champaign County relies heavily on volunteers – up to 175 a week.

In fact, volunteers keep the doors of the shelter open, said volunteer coordinator Kim Gollings.

"We would never be able to pay enough staff to take the amount of children we're allowed to take if we did not have volunteers," she said.

Unfortunately, this is the time of year when most of their volunteers – college students – leave town for the summer. And that means Gollings and other staff take on extra shifts – and turn some children away.

It's a perennial problem for many local agencies, but some are feeling an even greater pinch this year. With the recession and state budget problems, they aren't able to hire extra workers to fill the gaps.

"As budgets are cut and funding becomes more difficult, the volunteer team at each of the agencies becomes more and more critical," said Lynn Pesiker, Volunteer Connections coordinator for the United Way of Champaign County. "It's not busywork. It's essential work to the organization."

Agencies that serve the homeless, hungry, seniors and children are appealing for community volunteers to get through the summer months. Peisker estimates the number of student volunteers in the community drops by about 90 percent during the summer.

"That's a huge reduction," she said.

It's not just the UI. Parkland College also provides scores of volunteers, but during the summer 70 percent of the students take courses online and tend to be more focused on their personal lives, so there's no easy way to reach out to them, said volunteer coordinator Marsha Reardon. Direct contact with students tends to work best for recruiting volunteers, she said.

Student volunteerism has grown substantially in the last few years, Peisker said. They come from fraternities, sororities and other organizations that emphasize philanthropy; campus chapters of recognized charities like Relay for Life; and academic programs that require students to do public service work, such as a social entrepreneurship program in the UI College of Business.

"Students today, they've grown up with volunteering," said the Crisis Nursery's Gollings. "They did it in high school, it's a part of them."

The Crisis Nursery, which provides temporary shelter for up to 12 children at a time from families in crisis, has to maintain a child-adult ratio of 3-to-1. The nursery likes to have two volunteers on hand, in addition to staff, from 7 a.m. until 10 p.m., which children are asleep. "If it's really busy," Gollings said, volunteers sometimes spend the night.

The crunch usually hits the first weekend in May, as college students hunker down for finals and then leave town for the summer.

When that happens, "we beg, borrow and steal volunteers," Gollings said. Employees juggle schedules, and other volunteers are asked to pick up extra shifts or be on call.

For now the afternoon and evening shifts are covered, but weekends and mornings are tough because people work or are busy with family activities.

"Sometimes it means we can't take in as many children," she said.

The nursery has had to shorten the length of time children can stay so it can cover "high crisis care situations," said Laura Swinford, program director. "We had to turn away five children last month," she added, all lower-priority cases where the family's day-care fell through.

Circle of Friends Adult Day Care in Champaign typically has two student volunteers a day during the school year who run activities or just interact with the seniors, some of whom need one-on-one attention.

Take Katherine Thiede. She loves to play cards, and delights in the college students and children from Holy Cross School who visit during the school year, said owner Kathy Rhodes.

"She'd play cards all day long," she said.

But when volunteers depart for the summer, that's difficult. Employees do what they can, but "I can't have a staff member sitting for two hours playing cards," Rhodes said.

Circle of Friends relies on state funding for about 60 percent of its income, and the state is four months behind on payments to the agency.

"That's a lot of money I don't have to provide staff and extra activities," Rhodes said. "I can't hire extra staff. We just need to be creative. ... It's just so much easier when students are in town."

Some agencies don't see a summer dip, particularly those that provide formal internships or volunteer positions related to students' career goals – especially health-related fields, Peisker said.

Provena Covenant Medical Center, for example, has about 60 university students during the summer who help provide nonmedical services for patients, she said. And SmileHealthy, which provides dental care to low-income county residents, uses college volunteers and interns to develop projects, manage waiting lists, work on grant reports or help at clinics, Peisker said.

But one of the hardest-hit organizations is the Champaign County Mental Health Center, which relies on volunteers to staff its Crisis Line.

Crisis Line coordinator Benita Rollins-Gay said she had 65 active volunteers during the school year but is down to about 20 now. Many of her volunteers are UI psychology students.

Volunteers go through fairly intense training – 16 hours of sessions plus 16 hours on the job – and about 10 percent drop out because "it's too much for them," she said.

The Crisis Line averages about 300 calls a month, with 3,042 logged from July 2009 through April of this year. It handles calls from across the county as well as Danville, which doesn't have a psychiatric unit, Rollins-Gay said. After 5 p.m. it also takes calls to the UI Counseling Center, McKinley Health Center's mental health services and the UI Psychological Services Center.

For the summer, the Mental Health Center's respite center acts as a backup for calls, and Rollins-Gay and her supervisor take calls if the staff there is too busy. She's also asked local police departments for more help. Officers trained in hostage negotiations already work 8 hours a month each at the Crisis Line, "and that helps," she said.