“Wouldn’t ‘Stimulus Package’ make a great name for a band?” asks my colleague Kathy Ferreira. She’s right, and we could party all night while the government’s printing presses kept churning out more money we don’t really have, which will hopefully go to fix schools and roads, weatherize homes and government buildings, and along the way put people to work doing useful projects. The great thing about this kind of expense is that the money should actually be able to go to working people, and this kind of work can’t be outsourced to China or India.

Some people are asking if the package is big enough, others can’t fathom how the government, which in days of yore fought over a few billion dollars for the environment, health care or schools, can now blithely throw around trillions. Me, I am just trying to write it all down and get the right number of zeroes: $1,500,000,000,000.00, man that is quite a number! That is the current low estimate of the total cost of bailing out our Wall Street banks, stimulating the economy, and other expenses not yet contemplated but surely coming. But in the end, will it make any difference?

My father was born in 1915 and at seventeen, a high school drop-out, went into the Civilian Conservation Corp to escape near-starvation in the Great Depression (maybe we should start to call it Great Depression I). Still I can’t believe that all FDR’s stimulus actually ended the Depression. Rather, it was America’s entrance into World War II that finally provided full employment for all men 18-35, and brought women in to fill newly created war jobs, turning what was still a near-dead economy in 1941 into the only intact economy in the world in 1945, and a juggernaut at that. Of course, like everything else, George W. Bush got it backwards. Instead of finding a war to jump start an economy in crisis he started with the war, and an unnecessary and foolish one at that, so that by the time the recession came peace looks like the right move.

What does all this mean for nonprofits? Well, no surprise, we’ll have increasing need for every kind of services from legal help to stop evictions to food assistance, to housing, to substance abuse treatment, at the same time we’ll have less money to spend on it. I wish I could be more hopeful, but I don’t see any stimulus coming our way, not even enough to provide a Wall Street banker with a decent bonus! The Stimulus Package may rock, but not our world.

The last few weeks have brought a flurry of requests for speaking engagements all over the country on this timely topic. At last count we have about 20 such efforts underway, in locations ranging from California, Washington, New Mexico, to Colorado, Connecticut, Washington D.C., and Ontario, Canada.

At the same time requests for consulting services on strategic restructuring are have tripled compared to lat year. What’s up? Well, the general wisdom around here is that the economy is bringing the nonprofit sector to a moment of profound reflection. Some are predicting 10% of all nonprofits will go out of business in this recession, while others are viewing the worsening economic storm as an opportunity to restructure the sector.

Recently I spoke to a capacity crowd at the World Affairs Council in San Francisco, as part of the “Power of Partnership” series, co-presented by the Craigslist Foundation, the Foundation Center, Northern California Grantmakers, and CompassPoint Nonprofit Services. For 90 minutes a room full of engaged nonprofit leaders and I discussed the options they face going forward – collaborate, merge, compete, or retrench – as well as the real possibility that some groups will grow and thrive in this climate.

How can you be one of the thriving organizations and not an organization that suffers? For an increasing number of nonprofits, part of the answer seems to be strategic restructuring and evaluating the sector’s spectrum of partnership options.