Nonprofit Employment Up in Downturn

Nonprofit jobs grew during the two-year height of the recession, a period when for-profit jobs fell, and outpaced nonprofit job growth in the previous six years, a new study says.

Between the second quarter of 2007 and the second quarter of 2009, nonprofit employment grew 2.5 percent a year on average, according to initial analysis of data on 21 states by the Center for Civil Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

In the same period, for-profit employment in those states fell 3.3 percent a year on average, a pattern that held for every state examined.

In comparison, nonprofit jobs grew 2.3 percent a year on average from 2001 to 2007, a period when for-profit jobs grew only 0.2 percent a year on average.

“That nonprofit organizations that have been able to increase employment in the face of the most severe recession since the Great Depression is a testament to the effectiveness of the federal stimulus program, which channeled assistance to many nonprofit organizations, and to the resilience and determination of nonprofit leaders and those who support them in the public and private sectors,” Lester M. Salamon, author of the study and director of the Center for Civil Society Studies, says in a statement.

“But this accomplishment, impressive though it is,” he says, “still leaves many needs unmet and many organizations and regions under severe strain.”

Nonprofit jobs in some fields and states did not fare as well as in others between the second-quarter of 2009 and the second quarter of 2009.

Nonprofit jobs grew only 1.8 percent a year in the nursing-home field and only 1.4 percent in the social-assistance field in the two-year period, and grew only  0.7 percent in New Jersey, 1.3 percent in Michigan and Indiana, 1.4 percent in Ohio and 1.5 percent in Illinois.

In the field of social assistance, which faces rising demand in a recession, nonprofits jobs fell 4.5 percent in the District of Columbia, 1.5 percent in Maine, 0.9 percent in Indiana and 0.8 percent in Ohio.

The report says the fact that jobs grew faster for nonprofits overall than for for-profits may be as much a product of the fields in which nonprofits are active than it is a product of the nature of nonprofits, at least before the recession.

While nonprofit jobs grew 2.4 percent a year on average for the period 2001 to 2007 in the field of social assistance, for example, for-profit jobs in that field grew 7 percent a year on average.

And nonprofit jobs in the nursing-home field for the period great 2 percent a year, compared to 1.4 percent at for-profits.

Source: Philanthropy Journal