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New York City’s recession-weary arts and social service organizations are scrambling to find ways to make up for the loss of one of their biggest donors, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Although there had been signals from the Carnegie Corporation of New York as early as 2008 that the long-running grant program funded by an anonymous donor widely acknowledged to be Bloomberg was likely to end, confidence in the mayor’s continued generosity led some groups to budget the annual grant into their 2010 fiscal year plans. Indeed, many of those groups hoped the funding would continue to flow through the Bloomberg Family Foundation, but with the mayor having decided to end the program, organizations have been forced to trim staff, reduce payrolls, and/or sell parts of their collections.

To prepare organizations for the transition, Carnegie provided technical assistance and management training, which some organizations credit for helping them find ways to compensate for the loss of funding. At multidisciplinary arts center Performance Space 122, for example, the annual $75,000 grant it had received over the last few years represented 19 percent of its fundraising budget.

“Does it hurt? Of course,” said the organization’s development director, Morgan von Prelle Pecelli. “But the issue is that we can’t just think about the one loss or to be banking on it always being there….The onus, to some extent, is on all of us to be thinking ahead…and to realize that our funding sources are not the most reliable of things.”