New York, NY – For Desperate on Staten Island, a Worker of Last Resort

Staten Island, NY – For emergencies, there is 911. For noise complaints, there is 311. For those in dire straits on Staten Island, there is Devorah Weiss, a social worker whose cellphone number is passed on as a last resort.

“I ask how they get my name, and it’s always, ‘My friend told me and her friend told her,’ ” said Ms. Weiss, 55, the Staten Island social work liaison for Connect to Care, an initiative of UJA-Federation of New York aimed at helping the newly needy middle class.

Her social work services are also enlisted by the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, a beneficiary agency of UJA-Federation, and she has a desk at the Jewish Community Center of Staten Island. The posts keep her busy from the moment her phone starts ringing at 8 a.m. until it finally falls silent at 10 p.m.

“When you’re really desperate, sometimes you just need someone to listen to you,” she said one afternoon as she navigated the Staten Island streets in her beige minivan. She dresses modestly, all long skirts and covered elbows, in accordance with her Orthodox Jewish faith.

“I may look conventional,” she said in her gravelly, Bart Simpson-esque voice, “but I’m a troublemaker.”

UJA-Federation is one of the seven agencies supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. Ms. Weiss makes house calls, which allows clients to keep their financial distress under wraps. This being Staten Island, many of her clients live in suburban splendor, surrounded by the trappings of their wealth even after the crash drained their liquidity.

“She’s embarrassed, because of her high recognition, to come to my office,” Ms. Weiss said of her first client one afternoon late last year; she was an upper-middle-class housewife whose husband lost his business six months earlier. The spacious house was adorned with pink granite floors and Jerusalem stone, but it faced imminent foreclosure.

“She still dresses classy,” Ms. Weiss said quietly; “no one knows what her financial situation is. Her husband is in a depression.”

A few minutes later, Ms. Weiss’s client, who insisted on anonymity, said: “I felt helpless. I was never in this situation. But it’s either I stay in the fire and burn, or I jump.”

She was juggling three part-time jobs when she called Ms. Weiss, “the best call I ever made in my life,” she said. Ms. Weiss, whom she calls “my angel,” helped her apply for a mortgage modification and referred her to a legal advocacy group. She called Ms. Weiss this day because she needed to scrape together $700 to pay her heat and water bills.

“People like me, we never knew these things existed,” she said, referring to the social service programs Ms. Weiss taps into. “I was always on the other side – people would ask me for things.”

Each morning, Ms. Weiss, who has a master’s degree in education and a social work degree from Yeshiva University, sets off from her home in central New Jersey with her Bluetooth device fixed in her ear, fielding calls all the way to Staten Island. Her first caller was concerned because her parents had received a utility shut-off notice in the mail. Ms. Weiss listened patiently and recommended a financial adviser before scheduling a home appointment. Another caller needed help finding a psychiatrist; her husband of 45 years had recently died.

Ms. Weiss ends each call the same way: “If I don’t get back to you by 6, call me back.”

Four new clients call each day, on average, and Ms. Weiss finds other clients by mining a stack of food pantry intake forms. She finds more clients by sifting through 50 e-mails a day. All of this is possible because she requires only five hours of sleep a night, she said.

“Even if I can’t write a check for $10,000, I know I made a difference in terms of personal connection,” she said.

Later that afternoon, a recently unemployed single mother of three, speaking through sobs as she sat in Ms. Weiss’s tiny office at the Staten Island center, said: “If I didn’t have her, I don’t know what I’d do. This is the scariest time of my life.”

Ms. Weiss offered a few quotations from “The Secret,” a best-selling financial self-help book by Rhonda Byrne.

“I come away from every case with a tremendous amount of gratitude,” she said as she made her way to the day’s final client, a homebound 84-year-old who subsists on whatever Ms. Weiss brings her from a food pantry.

“When you can wake up in the morning and go to the bathroom on your own and you’re not hooked up to tubes and your bed is your own,” she said, “all is right with the world.”