NONPROFIT WORKS

An Interactive Database on the U.S. Nonprofit Economy

All links: Getting Started | Methodology | NED Project

This site offers access to the nonprofit employment and wage data collected as part of our Nonprofit Economic Data project (NED). Here, you can retrieve and manipulate data from our comprehensive employment and wages database, transform the data into your choice of visualizations, and download or save those visualizations in several formats.

Background

America's nonprofit sector employs the third largest workforce of any of the 18 industries into which statistical authorities divide the American economy. What is more, it is adding employment at a rate that exceeds that of the country's business sector. Yet, due to the way national economic data are kept, these facts are unknown to most policymakers, as well as to most leaders in the nonprofit sector itself.

The Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies' Nonprofit Economic Data Project has found a way to draw on a previously untapped source of data generated through the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) to produce cutting-edge reports on the size, composition, distribution, and growth of nonprofit employment in regions and states across the country and the U.S. as a whole. These reports have been instrumental in demonstrating the nonprofit sector's important role as an economic engine and identifying key nonprofit trends such as the striking pattern of nonprofit employment growth and the suburbanization of nonprofit operations. States and localities have used our data to advocate for the sector and to educate policymakers and the public about the sector's vital role not only as a program and service provider, but also as a major employer and growing industry.

NONPROFIT WORKS

Through Nonprofit Works, we will ensure these data can be more widely available. During this initial Beta release, you will have access to data on nonprofit employment and wages at both the state and county level. When the final version of the site is launched, you will be able to access contextual data as well - including for-profit employment and wages.

We believe that making these data available can have a powerful transformative impact on how nonprofits are perceived, and therefore on the support they can garner for their important work.

This site was made possible by the generous support of the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.