As a teenager, I was a paperboy, delivering copies of the Daily Homes News in my neighborhood.

It was well known in my small town that paperboys were flush with cash every Thursday, since Thursday was the day that we collected subscription dues on our routes. And, like clockwork, my friend Tommy would approach me every Thursday to borrow “some change” to purchase pastries from the corner store.

When Tommy’s tab hit a certain level, I would approach him to try to collect his debt. And whenever I approached him, his response was, “as long as I owe you, you’ll never go broke.”

I share this story because many of our nonprofits are operating with the notion that if their balance sheets contain some level of accounts receivable, they cannot go broke.

After all, those receivables will eventually become cash—someday.

But this is a dangerous mind-set. In actuality, a …

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In the early months of the economic downturn, many organizations considered the idea of collaboration. Many of our colleagues were open to the idea of strategic alliances ranging from shared back-office operations to full-blown mergers.

Yet in the Nonprofit Finance Fund’s 2010 survey of nonprofit groups, only 1 percent of the organizations actually reported having merged with another one. One conclusion is that it appears that the urgency for organizations to align themselves strategically has waned, although foundation funding to nonprofits continues to decline or disappear completely.

Anecdotally, in the communities I work with, collaborations have been minimal, if they exist at all. Perhaps organizations are waiting for foundation funding streams to reappear to pre-recession levels, negating the need for such collaboration. The truth of the matter is, funding as we knew it will not…

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