Driven by growing employment at arts organizations, American nonprofits added 18,000 jobs in April, according to new estimates from Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Civil Society Studies.
The slight gains, representing only 2.2 percent of the estimated net 830,000 nonprofit jobs lost since the start of the pandemic, were depressed in large part because schools and other educational organizations shrank payrolls by nearly 14,000 jobs in April, a month-over-month decline of 5.7 percent.
“March 2021 saw the largest overall recovery of nonprofit jobs since August 2020,” reads the report. “Unfortunately, April’s jobs report was far less hopeful, with the recovery rate declining and the key fields of education and health care losing additional jobs despite generally positive trends in vaccination rates in most of the country.”
Sluggish Growth in the U.S. Work Force
The April nonprofit jobs report details a month of slow job growth in the broader economy. After a year of persistent declines, the national unemployment rate leveled out at just above 6 percent from March to April, with nonfarm employment expanding by 266,000 workers. Roughly 9.8 million workers are unemployed, compared with 5.7 million in February 2020.
Overall, nonprofits employ 6.5 percent fewer workers, representing roughly lost 811,300 jobs, than they did before the pandemic, when nonprofits employed an estimated 12.5 million workers. If nonprofits continue to recover jobs at the rates seen since July 2020, it would take nearly 18 months to surpass prepandemic employment numbers.
Almost all other major parts of the nonprofit world added workers in April. Arts organizations expanded employment by 12.3 percent with the hiring of 13,900 jobs in April. But the work force at cultural nonprofits is still 27 percent smaller, roughly 98,700 jobs, than it was before the pandemic.
Among the other findings:
- A broad category that includes congregations, private foundations, civic organizations, and many other groups also grew by 12.3 percent from April to March with the addition of 9,700 jobs. With those new jobs, such organizations employed 69,400 fewer workers than they did before the pandemic, a decline of 8.5 percent.
- Social-service groups increased their work forces by 8.8 percent from March to April with the addition of 9,300 jobs. The social-service work force remains 6.3 percent, or 96,800 jobs, smaller than it was in February 2020.
- Nonprofit hospitals and other health care organizations contracted their work forces by less than 1 percent, shedding approximately 1,800 jobs. Health groups employed 3.5 percent, or 236,200, fewer workers than they did before the pandemic.
The Center for Civil Society Studies has estimated monthly nonprofit employment numbers since June 2020. Federal employment data does not detail nonprofit and for-profit employment. The estimates assume nonprofit job losses are proportional to the share of nonprofit jobs in a given industry.
