Five years ago, when Louise Dickmeyer first told Anne Ganey that mergers of nonprofit organizations were going to become a hot issue, Ganey didn’t believe her.

That was back when the economy was solid, when grant money was plentiful, when it was a boom time for startup nonprofits.

Nonprofits need their identity, need to fill their niche, Ganey said. It won’t happen.

“I thought, ‘It’s going to be really hard to get organizations to do that,’” she said.

Today, Ganey is advocating for more mergers, and has even started doing it with her own nonprofit. She is the executive director of the YWCA, which just this month allowed the local Girl Scouts office to move into its modest quarters in the Northwest Office Building.

Dickmeyer, who has spent her career working for nonprofits, saw this coming nearly a decade ago. While working on her master’s degree at Regis University in Denver, she produced a thesis on the merging of nonprofits.

It gathered dust for a few years until now. Today, with the economy limping along and nonprofits struggling more than ever, Dickmeyer’s work, turned into a book, seems even more relevant than when it was written.

And mergers are happening. Just a few weeks ago Theresa House and Partners for Affordable Housing — two organizations that provide services to the homeless but have slightly different missions — came together to pool resources and hope to maintain the current level of services to their clientele.

But Dickmeyer says she’s not in favor of shutting down nonprofits.

“Part of the reason I’m such a strong advocate for mergers is that I’ve never met a nonprofit I didn’t like,” she said.

Her book uses the nonprofit merger she knows best as a case study: that of the Bloomington and Minneapolis chambers of commerce.

She was involved from the very beginning of merger discussion talks and followed it through to the votes in both cities that made it official.

One thing she says that may not be easy for nonprofits to hear is this: “The nonprofit sector has proliferated for years and there’s just too many of them.”

Roughly 36,000 new nonprofits spring up each year, and almost all of them need to raise money. In today’s economy, funds are harder to come by and it’s harder to pry dollars from donors’ hands when folks are getting laid off and wages, for many, are stagnant.

According to a report by the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits, 57 percent of Minnesota nonprofits reported reduced revenues. At the same time, many of them are seeing an increase in demand for their services.