Although the major locus of mental health care in the United States is in community agencies, funding cutbacks threaten the services those agencies provide. To assist human service managers in developing guidelines and concrete action strategies for dealing with financial problems, 106 mental health professionals (e.g., agency directors, technical experts, government officials) with knowledge of community mental health center (CMHC) cutback management issues participated in a delphi process to identify action strategies. In the first round, panel members described 77 actions which might be conceptualized to weather cutbacks. In the second round, those action strategies were rated on four dimensions (importance, desirability, feasibility, and validity), resulting in a rank ordering of the strategies. On the third round, panelists identified and ranked 15 strategies which they felt were most critical for weathering cutbacks. An analysis of the results showed a substantial consenus between the second and third round rankings. The 15 most important action strategies fell into internal organizational management and external environmental management categories. Internal organizational management strategies included development and maintenance of management information systems, priority setting in the areas of services and personnel, and improvement in business practices. External environmental management strategies included development of agency board coalitions, fund raising capacity, and client screening. (Listings of the top 15 strategies and the overall 77 strategies are appended.) (BL)