Nonprofit Tech

Democratic Leadership Council

The Quiet Crisis

This report was written to shine a spotlight on the under-reported plight of America’s nonprofit organizations and to make recommendations for how the nation can respond. In the wake of the economic downturn, hospitals, nursing homes, nursery schools, senior centers, soup kitchens, and other nonprofit organizations have been hit by a triple whammy. The evaporation of wealth has decimated charitable donations; the state and local budget crunch is costing nonprofits their foremost paying clients; and the human need for nonprofit help is skyrocketing as nonprofit resources shrink.

Reversing the nonprofit plunge is a matter of jobs, not just charity. With 9.4 million employees and 4.7 million full-time volunteers nationwide, nonprofits constitute 11 percent of the American workforce—greater than the auto and financial industries combined. If the nonprofit sector were a country, it would have the seventh largest economy in the world. We cannot afford for it to go the way of Iceland, whose financial system collapsed.

So far, the economic debate has almost completely overlooked nonprofits. That is a mistake, because no sector offers more bang for the buck. For example, national service volunteers—individuals who spent one or more years of their lives in full-time or part-time civilian service to the country—cost less per hour than private-sector employees making the minimum wage. A report showed that such national service among disadvantaged youth led to successful post-service employment and higher earnings than their peers with no national service experience. Such citizen service, one of America’s finest and longstanding traditions, offers policymakers a hat trick: a way to create hundreds of thousands of jobs at low cost to government, with great national purpose—meeting the country’s most challenging needs in education, poverty, health care, energy, and the environment—and with no new bureaucracy, since individuals work through existing nonprofit organizations.

This report makes several concrete recommendations on how our nation can spark a strong nonprofit recovery and permit more Americans to do good works in hard times.

Publishing Details

Author: Bruce Reed and John Bridgeland
Published: March 2009
Length: 22 pages
Report Type: Full Report
Download: Adobe Acrobat (PDF)
Permalink: http://www.nonprofit-tech.org/reports/article/the_quiet_crisis/

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