Nonprofit Workforce

An interesting report from the John Hopkins Center in Maryland shows that nonprofit employment went up while the economy went down.

That makes sense, as people who've lost higher paying jobs in the private sector could migrate to lower paying ones in the nonprofit sector and be warmly received, especially those with business, marketing, or fundraising skills to help the nonprofits, who also have to compensate for the reduced funding streams they're experiencing.

An excerpt.

“New data on recent nonprofit employment trends in Maryland confirm an earlier finding of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies: nonprofit organizations are a counter-cyclical force in the economy, actually adding workers in times of economic downturn.

“The new Maryland data draw on the state’s Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) for 2007 and 2008. Assembled by state labor departments in cooperation with the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics through quarterly surveys of places of employment, the QCEW is a carefully assembled and monitored data source that provides more timely data on nonprofit employment and wages than any other source.1

“Growth During the Recession

“• Despite the recession underway at the time, nonprofit employment in Maryland continued its growth in 2008, increasing by 2.7 percent between the fourth quarter of 2007 and the fourth quarter of 2008.

“• By contrast, for-profit employment in Maryland decreased by 3.3 percent during this same period, eliminating over 61,000 jobs. Demonstrating the nonprofit sector’s role as a critical counter-cyclical force, nonprofits thus accounted for all of the state’s private employment growth between 2007 and 2008.”