Nonprofit employment is still struggling to rebound from the economic disruptions of the pandemic, with nonprofit job recovery slowing dramatically in recent months, according to a new analysis from the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies.
Nonprofits in June regained an estimated 24 percent of the 1.6 million nonprofit jobs initially lost in the early stages of the pandemic, but those job-recovery rates have slowed since then. In July, the job-recovery rate slipped to 9 percent, then 7 percent in August. In September, the nonprofit job-recovery rate was only 1 percent, the report says.
In all, the nonprofit work force had roughly 954,450 fewer jobs in September than in February, before the pandemic. That’s a decline of nearly 8 percent from nonprofit prepandemic employment levels.
“The estimated 1 million nonprofit workers who have lost their jobs since the start of the pandemic may therefore not regain them anytime soon,” reads the report. “It will be up to strained charities to help the nonprofit workforce cope with the pressures its members are under.”
Compared with prepandemic levels, employment in nonprofits in the arts, entertainment, and recreation suffered the steepest rate of job loss, down 123,493 jobs in September from prepandemic employment levels, a loss of nearly 35 percent of the nonprofit jobs in those fields.
Education nonprofits were also hit hard; since the start of the pandemic, educational nonprofits have eliminated an estimated 251,690 jobs, or 12.6 percent of the sector’s prepandemic work force. Educational nonprofits shed about 50,000 jobs in September alone.
Social-assistance nonprofits also continue to see reduced work forces, with approximately 10 percent of prepandemic jobs lost since February, or about 154,220 fewer jobs at the end of September. But the social-assistance nonprofits added 22,565 jobs in September alone, according to the analysis, equal to nearly 13 percent of the 176,782 unrecovered jobs in the sector at the start of the month.
The Hopkins research is the latest in a monthly series of reports launched in June that use federal employment data to project corresponding unemployment rates in the nonprofit sector. Because federal employment data does not distinguish between nonprofit and for-profit jobs, the researchers use overall employment data and assume that nonprofit job losses are proportional to the share of nonprofit jobs in each industry.
