PROVIDENCE –– A South Side nonprofit organization that helps criminal offenders returning to the community after prison may soon be among the victims of Bernard L. Madoff, the Wall Street trader who confessed to defrauding his clients of about $50 billion in investments.

Sol Rodriguez, executive director of the Rhode Island Family Life Center, said yesterday that two national foundations that provide a third of the center’s annual budget have lost their endowments in the scheme and are being forced to close next month.

Rodriguez said the agency has been granted a total of about $500,000 from the JEHT Foundation, a national philanthropic organization, over the last several years for prisoner reentry work, and about $100,000 from the RockIt Fund for its advocacy for voting rights for Rhode Islanders on probation and parole.

Because the JEHT Foundation — JEHT is an acronym for justice, equality, human dignity and tolerance — had already given the Family Life Center a multi-year grant for the period ending December 2009, Rodriguez said she doesn’t think the center will soon face tough decisions about layoffs or programs. The center has used its latest grant from the RockIt Fund for a voter registration drive, she said.

However, she is worried about the long term. Few foundations offer financial support for the kind of work done by the Family Life Center, which advocates for ex-offenders and their families, and works with communities affected by crime. In particular, the JEHT Foundation had provided the primary support for the Family Life Center since the Providence organization opened in 2003. The center now serves about 1,000 people annually, she said.

“The future is really unclear for us,” Rodriguez said. “They aren’t just losing money. They’re closing their doors.”

Both RockIt and JEHT had endowments tied up with Madoff, who is accused of defrauding investors, ranging from banking institutions and the very wealthy, to charities and pensioners. According to federal filings reported in the media, Madoff’s firm managed more than two dozen funds overseeing $17 billion. The impact of Madoff’s alleged Ponzi scheme is still being realized, a week after federal authorities uncovered it.

Robert Crane, the president of the JEHT Foundation, posted a message on the JEHT Web site on Monday, after learning that the funds of its donors had been managed by Madoff.

“The JEHT Foundation board deeply regrets that the important work that the Foundation has undertaken over the years is ending so abruptly,” wrote Crane. “The issues the Foundation addressed received very limited philanthropic support and the loss of the foundation’s funding and leadership will cause significant pain and disruption of the work for many dedicated people and organizations.”

“It’s pretty sad. It’s a pretty frightening time,” Rodriguez said yesterday. “People who are going to suffer are the individuals we serve.”A failure to regulate

•Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Christopher Cox said yesterday his agency repeatedly failed for at least a decade to pursue allegations of wrongdoing by Wall Street figure Bernard L. Madoff, the alleged perpetrator of a $50-billion Ponzi scheme.

 Cox ordered a probe by the SEC’s inspector general, saying the agency’s staff had never brought the Madoff matter to the attention of commissioners.

 Since the SEC staff never recommended that the commission open a formal investigation, subpoena power was not used to obtain information and the staff relied on information voluntarily produced by Madoff and his firm.

 “I am gravely concerned by the apparent multiple failures over at least a decade to thoroughly investigate these allegations or at any point to seek formal authority to pursue them,” Cox said in a statement.

 Rhode Island’s Sen. Jack Reed, the chairman of the Senate Banking panel that oversees the SEC, said in an interview yesterday that the Madoff affair “illustrates the lack of credible enforcement over several years by the SEC.” He criticized the agency’s “lack of a strong commitment to be vigilant.” (AP)

amilkovi@projo.com