December 10, 2021 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Nonprofits added 5,274 jobs in November, a small gain in a month when overall hiring also underwhelmed analysts, according to new estimates from Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies.
Nonprofits still have roughly 4 percent fewer workers than they did before the pandemic. That’s equivalent to 485,190 fewer jobs than the 12.5 million jobs at nonprofits in February 2020. Hopkins researchers estimate it will take until at least October 2022 for nonprofit employment to exceed pre-pandemic levels.
Though marginal, the gains were driven by hiring among religious, grant-making, civic, and professional nonprofits, a broad category that includes groups such as churches, private foundations, and political-advocacy organizations. These nonprofits added an estimated 2,809 jobs in November but employ roughly 4.5 percent fewer people than they did in February 2020.
Social-assistance nonprofits, which include food banks and homeless shelters, added 1,480 jobs in November. The field remains 3.7 percent smaller than it was before the pandemic, when it employed 1.5 million workers.
Health-care nonprofits added 912 jobs. The field is roughly 3 percent smaller than it was before the pandemic, when it carried 6.7 million jobs.
Arts, entertainment, and recreation nonprofits remain hard hit. Those groups employ 13 percent fewer workers than in February 2020, when they supported 355,965 jobs. Nonprofits in those fields added an estimated 791 jobs to their nonprofit ranks in November.
Educational-service nonprofits lost 1,632 jobs. The field is 6.3 percent smaller than it was in February 2020, when it supported slightly more than 2 million jobs.
In the broader economy, employers added an estimated 210,000 jobs, fewer than what analysts had expected. Still, the overall unemployment rate fell 0.4 percent to 4.2 percent, the lowest point since the start of the pandemic.
“The emergence of the Omicron variant, coupled with the uneven recovery recorded over the fall months, makes the future recovery the of nonprofit work force more difficult to predict,” the researchers concluded.
Researchers from Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies have been tracking nonprofit employment levels since 2020. The estimates are based on federal data on the proportion of nonprofit jobs in U.S. industries.
