With a nursing shortage looming in North Carolina, a state-funded group that develops strategies to find nurses may shut down at the end of the month for lack of money from the General Assembly.

The N.C. Center for Nursing -- founded in 1991 to avoid nursing shortages that have periodically crippled hospitals, nursing homes, mental institutions and home health-care services -- was not included in the state House budget passed last week.

Advocates for the center were in Raleigh on Wednesday trying to persuade Senate leaders to include funding in their budget, which will likely be presented next week.

At issue is $500,000, which funds the center's research and pays the salaries of six staff members.

"That's a drop in the bucket," said Cherry Beasley, chairwoman of the center's board of directors and a nurse educator at UNC-Pembroke.

The budget cut is the result of the center's unique structure. It's funded under the University of North Carolina system but doesn't operate as a purely educational program. So it slips outside the system's priorities.

Rep. Marian McLawhorn, a Democrat from Pitt County who is co-chairwoman of the House's education appropriation committee, said she supports the center but did not make a move to include it on the committee's budget. As the budget progressed, she said, there were other opportunities to add funding, but no one took the initiative. Now it's up to the Senate.

"The legislative appropriations process is intense, and it's intense because there are so many worthy requests that are out there," McLawhorn said. Funding one thing, she said, means taking money from another.

Supporters of the center, which was the first established by any state, say it helped North Carolina fare better than other states during national nursing shortages. Soon after the center's inception, the state began strongly outpacing the national average, with 92.2 nurses per 100,000 population in North Carolina, compared with 82.5 per 100,000 people nationally in 2005, the last year for which figures are available.

"Our whole focus is ... to avoid a crisis," said Linda M. Lacey, associate director of research for the center. "We have been successful in doing that."

The center collects data, surveys employers and tracks where and what kinds of nurses are needed. It then works with nursing schools at the state's four-year colleges and two-year community colleges to gear up programs that will meet those needs.

Lacey said the state now faces a bottleneck that could result in a severe shortage. Many nurses are nearing retirement, just as baby boomers are aging into a stage in life where they'll need more nursing care. And nursing schools are losing veteran teachers, and there are not enough nurses with advanced degrees moving into the teaching ranks.

So, even though many colleges and community colleges have waiting lists of students wanting to enter nursing programs, they don't have enough teachers to expand the programs.

"It's an incredible problem," said Robert Morrison, a member of the center's board of directors and president of Randolph Hospital in Asheboro. Morrison said the nursing center has identified the problem and is working on strategies to solve it.

Although nursing schools, hospital groups and even legislators support the center, he said, finding a funding commitment is proving difficult. Wednesday's meetings with Senate leaders did not ease concerns.

"I'm going to say we're being listened to politely," Morrison said, "and we're encouraged to keep working. But I have not yet talked to anybody who is extremely optimistic that the money will be put back in the budget for it. We're going to keep working as hard as we can, but I haven't heard the 'Yes, we're going to get this done' that I think we need to hear."