CHAPEL HILL -- Four local organizations are getting a timely assist from the UNC men's basketball team, in the form of $70,000 in donations.

As it has the past couple of years during the tenure of head coach Roy Williams, the team signed hundreds of basketballs last fall, and sold them over the subsequent months to raise money for charitable causes, said C.B. McGrath, director of basketball operations for the team.

The team has given $15,000 of the funds to the Inter-Faith Council for Social Services, specifically for the men's shelter and kitchen that the IFC operates on West Rosemary Street.

In addition, a department at UNC Hospitals will receive $35,000 and the team is donating $10,000 to the local Ronald McDonald House and another $10,000 to a scholarship fund for needy North Carolina students at UNC, McGrath said.

"First of all, it came at a great time, because contributions have been slow," said IFC Executive Director Chris Moran Thursday.

"Everyone knows about the great basketball that Coach Williams has brought to Chapel Hill, and we applaud him for that. But we applaud him more for the care and commitment he's showing to our homeless residents and the people we serve."

Moran asked McGrath if the IFC could spread word about the team's donations, in part because of the massive, post-Hurricane Katrina recovery under way in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

Moran contended there were "two parts to the story" -- not only the monumental needs of the hurricane victims, but also the continuing needs of people in other parts of the country served by local nonprofits. In a thank-you note to McGrath, he mentioned a recent statement from the Triangle United Way, which said the needs addressed by the charity's programs "have not gone away in the face of the challenges that Hurricane Katrina has created."

The statement added that programs would be relying on local donations even more "for stability and sustained funding while the spotlight shines on hurricane relief and to deal with the increased needs that Hurricane Katrina is bringing."

Moran said he and others in the nonprofit sector were concerned it might become increasingly difficult to get the donations needed to provide services, with so much focus on the hurricane recovery.

When Moran described donations to the IFC as being slow, he was talking about the time period before the hurricane. He said the summer typically was a down time for donations from individuals.

But Moran said his group saw a significant drop in donations following the tsunami that devastated parts of Asia at the end of 2004. He added that the U.S. economy still had weak spots, and that Katrina would impact the economy as well.

"We are concerned, and we do not want our individual contributions to go down," he said. "We want them to remain the same or go higher, if we're going to continue to do what everyone has expected us to do for years."

McGrath said Williams had brought the basketball-signing idea to UNC from his days as coach at Kansas. The 2004-05 Tar Heels signed nearly 1,000 balls at the start of last season, and most of those were sold to raise money, he said.

The team actually had decided on where to give the funds a few months back, and wanted to stick with that plan.

"There are some charities here that need help as well, so we figured we would keep it local," McGrath said.