From Philanthropy News Digest 1/14/2022 —
“As of the end of 2021, the U.S. nonprofit workforce is estimated to be down by 459,000 jobs — or 3.7 percent — from pre-pandemic levels, an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data by the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies finds.
The sector added an estimated 9,246 jobs in December, regaining just 2 percent of the 468,116 jobs still lost to the COVID-19 pandemic as of November and 0.6 percent of the estimated 1.64 million nonprofit jobs lost during the first three months of the pandemic. The fields that saw the strongest recovery last month were religious, grantmaking, civic, professional, and similar organizations (8 percent of jobs still lost as of November) and social assistance (6.9 percent), followed by education (2.1 percent) and arts, entertainment, and recreation (0.2 percent); health care saw additional job losses of 0.7 percent.
According to the center’s final report tracking the impact of the pandemic on the nonprofit workforce, the remaining lost jobs include 12.5 percent of pre-pandemic workers in nonprofit arts and entertainment organizations; 5.6 percent of those in education; 4 percent of those in religious, grantmaking, and civic associations; and 3.4 percent of those in social service organizations.
Based on average rates of job recovery from January through December 2021, the report estimates that it will take another eleven months for the nonprofit sector’s jobs to return to pre-pandemic levels — 8.8 months for social assistance; 7.1 months for religious, grantmaking, civic, professional, and similar organizations; 6.6 months for arts, entertainment, and recreation; and 5.9 percent for education. Nonprofit healthcare jobs saw so little growth in 2021 that no reliable estimate could be projected.
‘The twin challenges of the unpredictable nature of the on-going pandemic and significant difficulties in hiring now coming to light [make it] difficult to predict what the future holds for the nation’s third largest employer as we enter into 2022,” the report’s authors note. “With nearly a half million of the sector’s pre-pandemic workers still missing from the workforce, nonprofits have a steep hill to climb as they continue their critical work to assist and support the recovery of their communities.'”