The nation’s recovery from the Covid crisis meant nonprofits were in hiring mode in June, expanding their payrolls by roughly 60,000 jobs, an 8 percent month-to-month increase, according to new estimates from the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies.
The study also found that since June 2020, nearly 60 percent of nonprofit jobs that were eliminated due to the health and economic crisis have been restored. If hiring continues at that pace, it will take until September 2022 for nonprofit employment over all to exceed pre-pandemic levels.
The increase was driven by robust hiring among all but one part of the nonprofit economy: Health-care nonprofits cut 5,300 jobs in June, shrinking that part of the work force by 2.3 percent. All other causes saw double-digit percentage growth in job numbers from May to June.
“The volatility in the health-care sector — the single largest field of nonprofit employment — makes it difficult to predict when nonprofit jobs will return to their pre-pandemic levels,” says the report. “However, recent strong recoveries seen in previously hard-hit fields such as education and the arts provide a view of a possible way forward for at least these crucial sectors”
Where Jobs Are Growing
By sheer numbers, colleges, schools, and other educational institutions expanded the most, with the addition of about 27,400 jobs in June, a 12.2 percent expansion. Educational organizations employed 1.8 million last month, down roughly 10 percent from February 2020.
Social-service organizations hired 13,300 workers in June, up 14.9 percent from May. Social-assistance groups employed 1.4 million at the end of June, roughly 5 percent fewer workers than before the pandemic.
Arts, entertainment, and recreation nonprofits hired roughly 11,400 workers in June, a 13.3 percent one-month expansion. These nonprofits employed 281,300 at the end of June: That’s 21 percent fewer workers than before the pandemic.
Religious, grant-making, civic, and professional nonprofits added 10,900 jobs in June, growing by 15.2 percent. At the end of the month, these groups employed roughly 757,800 workers, down 7.4 percent from February 2020.
The latest edition of the report, which has been released monthly since June 2020, also provided researchers with their first opportunity to examine year-over-year data. When the research began, the authors estimated nonprofits had eliminated 1.6 million jobs. A year later, 700,000 nonprofit jobs are still unrecovered.
The report is based on federal jobs data. Because federal unemployment reports do not break out nonprofit employment figures, the report’s estimates assume nonprofit job losses are proportional to job losses seen in other industry categories.
