Nonprofit Job Growth Anemic as New Covid Wave Looms

The nonprofit job recovery continued at an anemic pace in October, a worrisome sign that recent gains could be erased if a surging wave of Covid-19 cases results in more strict social-distancing measures and economic disruptions.

Nonprofits added roughly 38,200 jobs to their payrolls in October, according to an analysis from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Civil Society Studies. But the nonprofit work force was still about 7 percent smaller in October than it was in February, with an estimated net loss of 910,850 nonprofit jobs since the pandemic began.

Health-care nonprofits led the way in growth, with more than 25,300 jobs added. Education nonprofits, a category that includes schools, lost an estimated 15,250 jobs in October. It’s the second month in a row that education nonprofits have cut jobs. They employed 12.3 percent fewer workers in October than in February.

In May, at the depths of the first wave of the U.S. Covid-19 pandemic, nonprofits had cut 1.6 million jobs from their payrolls. In June, nonprofits seemed to be making a comeback, regaining 24 percent of those jobs. But since then, the growth has slowed. In September, nonprofits recovered only 1.7 percent of the jobs initially lost. That number rose slightly in October, to 2.3 percent.

In their report, researchers said, “With the onset of the recent spike in daily Covid-19 infections and deaths and the resulting re-institutions of restrictions aimed at curbing these new trends, it seems quite possible that even the recent slow recovery in nonprofit jobs evident in recent months will not be sustained in November and possibly beyond.”

Arts, entertainment, and recreation nonprofits continue to see the greatest share of job cuts among nonprofits. As of October, those nonprofits were employing 34.2 percent fewer workers than in February 2020.

Federal employment data does not distinguish between nonprofit and for-profit jobs so the researchers used overall employment data and assumed that nonprofit job losses were proportional to the share of nonprofit jobs in each industry.