Community-based nonprofits play important and tangible roles in the lives of children in the United States. But many of these groups currently face financial and administrative challenges that are rooted in the economic downturn, policy shifts, and the increase in public reticence toward charities that followed the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. This brief uses the D.C. metropolitan region as a case study to assess the fiscal health of nonprofits in 2000, and finds that many providers were poorly positioned financially to absorb the social and economic shocks that followed the events of 9/11.