New London - The DNA EpiCenter has needed financial help from the state to keep its programs afloat over the past few years.

But it is using its most recent government aid for a different purpose: Finding ways to get along - temporarily - without it.

”We're not going to rely on the state this coming year,” said Abby L. Demars, the executive director of the center, which provides hands-on science education programs for school students who visit their recently renovated labs.

Even as leading lawmakers were warning last November that the looming budget crisis could require significant reductions in spending on prized local charities and educational institutions, Sen. Andrea Stillman, D-Waterford, and Rep. Betsy Ritter, D-Waterford, secured a pair of state grants for the center totaling $150,000.

The funding came from the $2 million contingency accounts that were controlled and distributed by Senate President Donald E. Williams Jr., D-Brooklyn, and then-House Speaker James A. Amann, D-Milford, as part of a budget agreement with Gov. M. Jodi Rell. The pools of money were approved by the legislature and signed into law by Rell but condemned by some lawmakers as slush funds to allow the leaders to lavish aid on pet projects.

In an interview this week, Demars said one of the key ways the center has used its most recent infusion of state assistance has been to hire a full-time grant-writer - an employee who will help the organization try to support itself entirely on charitable funds and grants as the state's ability to pay for nonprofit activities recedes.

The number of grant applications submitted by the center, which has an annual budget of around $280,000, has risen from five to around 35 a year, Demars said.

Still, staffers at the DNA EpiCenter don't expect to ever sever their financial relationship with the state completely. Since the public schools whose students take field trips to the center to use its lab equipment are under state mandate to provide hands-on education in the sciences, the center is shouldering some of the burden that would otherwise be borne by individual schools and districts, Demars said.

”The plan was never to become completely independent of state funding, because we feel what we do here the state should have some stakeholder role in,” Demars said. “We're supplementing some of what public schools are supposed to be offering. Since we're supporting, essentially, a mandate from the state, the state should play a role.”

The center's recent lab renovation included the installation of some $100,000 worth of equipment, she said, arguing that science lessons are more efficiently provided to students and teachers by allowing school groups to travel there rather than replicating the center's facilities many times over.

The center had hoped to secure itself the same status enjoyed by other nonprofit institutions such as the Mystic Aquarium and Institute for Exploration, which has for years received earmarked funds from the state's operating budget to support its programs and offerings. But even that funding is now in doubt, as the state faces a budget deficit that is now widely assumed to surpass $3 billion in fiscal 2010 and that could reach $10 billion over the next two years.

So a standing earmark will have to wait, and the EpiCenter, which has enjoyed financial support in the past from benefactors like Pfizer Inc., the Kitchings Foundation, and the Community Foundation of Southeastern Connecticut, will have to depend on the kindness of friends.

”Our goal was to get to that point,” Demars said of one day winning a line-item for the center in the state budget. “But the economy is taking it in the other direction.”

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