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Project Background
Nonprofit organizations are facing increased pressures nationally and in states and localities throughout the United States. Unfortunately, however, the sector's ability to respond to these pressures has long been impeded by a lack of timely data and information on key features of the nonprofit economy and the trends it is experiencing.
Thanks to the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies' new, cutting-edge Nonprofit Economic Data (NED) Project, however, at least a partial solution has been found to this problem. By synthesizing and analyzing data from a variety of datasets on nonprofit organizations, some of them newly available, this Project has created a capability to chart the key trends affecting the nonprofit sector and its component sub-sectors—such as nursing homes, hospitals, home health centers, education, social services, and the arts—at national, regional, state, and local levels.
Our analyses and reports are truly reshaping how the sector is viewed in local, state and region economies. For instance, among other things, our work has shown that:
Nonprofit employment is much larger than expected and much more widely dispersed, outdistancing many major industries in its contribution to state employment and payrolls;
Nonprofit employment is dynamic, growing more rapidly than overall employment;
Nonprofit employment is spreading to the suburbs and rural areas;
Nonprofit wages actually exceed for-profit wages in many of the fields where both sectors operate;
Despite their growth, nonprofits in many states are losing "market share" to for-profit firms in many fields where both sectors are operating.
