Nonprofit Employment

Fallout from the so-called Great Recession has been widespread and persistent. Three years after the economy started to slump, statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that more than 15 million Americans are out of work, 6.3 million have been unemployed at least six months, and the number who want to work full time but cannot due to economic reasons (U6) is stuck at about 27 million people, an eye-popping 17 percent of the workforce.

So it was a surprise when the Center for Civil Society Studies at Johns Hopkins University released a report earlier this year which showed that employment in the nonprofit sector -- the fourth-largest employer, by industry, in the U.S. -- had held up reasonably well during the economic downturn.

Based on an analysis of data from twenty-states, the report found that between the second quarter of 2007 and the second quarter of 2009, the worst part of the recession, nonprofit employment grew by an average of 2.5 percent annually, while for-profit employment in those states declined by an average of 3.3 percent annually. Another surprise: annual nonprofit job growth over that two-year period actually was stronger than the 2.3 percent annual rate the sector experienced during the 2001-07 period, before the wheels on the economy started to come off, while annual job growth in the for-profit sector was a paltry .02 percent during that period.