{"id":316376,"date":"2025-10-19T16:16:35","date_gmt":"2025-10-19T16:16:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/316376\/"},"modified":"2025-10-19T16:16:35","modified_gmt":"2025-10-19T16:16:35","slug":"nonprofit-sector-is-vital-if-vulnerable-piece-of-philadelphias-economy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/316376\/","title":{"rendered":"Nonprofit Sector Is Vital, if Vulnerable, Piece of Philadelphia’s Economy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editor\u2019s note: This article is the first in a series examining the changing nature of the nonprofit sector in Philadelphia.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Nonprofit organizations play a critical role in Philadelphia and represent a major source of area employment. They accounted for 30% of the city\u2019s private sector jobs in 2022, according to federal data. <\/p>\n

City residents rely on these organizations to provide critical services to Philadelphia\u2019s communities. In many instances, these organizations work as contractors with the city to deliver key public services. Some are also major employers, such as universities or hospitals. But ongoing policy discussions that could affect nonprofits, as well as last year\u2019s closures of several notable nonprofits, have put a spotlight on the potential fragility of this sector. <\/p>\n


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To get a better understanding of the changing landscape in the city\u2019s nonprofit sector, The Pew Charitable Trusts is taking a closer look. This is the first article in a series that will look at employment, revenue sources, and other aspects of the nonprofit ecosystem.<\/p>\n

To assess the jobs picture in recent years, Pew relied on the Business Employment Dynamics Nonprofit Sector Research Data<\/a> from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for 2013-22. This data provides the most comprehensive look at nonprofit employment and wages in the area, despite some methodological<\/a> limitations. The organizations included in the data are privately owned 501(c)(3) organizations with employees in Philadelphia. Because of BLS confidentiality rules, individual entities cannot be identified from the data. The findings of this analysis focus on the nonprofit sector as a whole. <\/p>\n

Finally, these findings apply to the local nonprofit sector as it looked in 2022, a typical lag for this kind of economic data. The numbers for 2025, were they available, might look somewhat different because of closures, economic pressures, and other factors.<\/p>\n

In 2022, Philadelphia had an estimated 174,909 nonprofit employees. That represented 30% of total private employment and 26% of total employment citywide. Most of those jobs were in two of the sectors defined by the federal government\u2019s North American Industry Classification System (NAICS): health care and social assistance (98,895, or 57% of nonprofit employment in the city), such as hospitals; and educational services (53,840, or 31%), including higher education institutions and educational support services. (See Figure 1.) Hospitals and educational institutions are among the city\u2019s largest employers and largely consist of 501(c)(3) organizations, driving these results.<\/p>\n

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Looking at the data from a different perspective highlights the overall importance of these sectors as employers; 58% of all health care and social assistance workers in the private workforce were employed by nonprofit organizations. Among education workers, that figure was higher, with 95% of private industry workers being employed by nonprofit organizations, including several major colleges and universities. There was a relatively low presence of for-profit private employment in these top two NAICS sectors, particularly for educational services. This does not account for employment within publicly run entities, such as the School District of Philadelphia. <\/p>\n


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The large share of nonprofit employees among private entities, particularly in education and health care, points to the city\u2019s reliance upon nonprofit organizations to provide critical services. <\/p>\n

From 2013 through 2022, nonprofit job growth in Philadelphia generally matched total private industry employment growth, with each rising about 10%. But there were variations. For instance, during the pandemic, nonprofit employment in the city fell much less than overall private employment did, perhaps because of the large share of essential workers within these organizations, such as hospitals and other health care settings, during that time. (See Figure 2.)<\/p>\n

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Among seven U.S. cities and counties in the Northeast and Midwest, the share of nonprofit workers in Philadelphia\u201430%\u2014proved to be on the high end in 2022. Among those studied, only Baltimore had a higher share of nonprofit employment (35.5%). Across all of these cities and counties, most of the nonprofit employment was in the health and education NAICS sectors, including over a quarter in Philadelphia. (See Figure 3.)<\/p>\n

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For many years, Philadelphia\u2019s economy has been strongly dependent on the nonprofit sector, which often acts as an extension of the city government in its ability to deliver critical services to the most vulnerable members of the community. In recent years, however, researchers, officials, and city advocates have seen signs of vulnerability. Those are in part compounded by current policy debates at the federal level that could have a significant impact on these organizations. <\/p>\n


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The repercussions of these potential changes could be significant\u2014both for communities served by these organizations and the workers employed by them\u2014but they were not considered in this analysis. The data here extends only through 2022. The next data release, which will extend through 2027, is years away. <\/p>\n

In the meantime, shifts in the nonprofit economy in Philadelphia and elsewhere will be watched with great interest by those who run nonprofit organizations, work for them, and are served by them. <\/p>\n

Alix Sullivan works on The Pew Charitable Trusts\u2019 Philadelphia research and policy initiative.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Editor\u2019s note: This article is the first in a series examining the changing nature of the nonprofit sector…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":316377,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[159016,347,159014,1307,64,159015,159013,420,1313,1309,1312,1311,1310,120299,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-316376","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-jobs","8":"tag-alix-sullivan","9":"tag-article","10":"tag-build-communities","11":"tag-building-civic-infrastructure","12":"tag-business","13":"tag-fiscal-and-economic-policy","14":"tag-improve-economic-advancement","15":"tag-jobs","16":"tag-katie-martin","17":"tag-local-policy","18":"tag-pew-charitable-trusts","19":"tag-philadelphia","20":"tag-philadelphia-research-and-policy","21":"tag-strengthen-state-government","22":"tag-united-states","23":"tag-unitedstates","24":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115401732342785577","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=316376"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316376\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/316377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=316376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=316376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=316376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}