By Michael Theis AUGUST 18, 2021 – From The Chronicle of Philanthropy

Nonprofits added roughly 67,200 workers in July, according to researchers at the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies.

Coupled with upward revisions in June’s employment numbers, July’s gains are the strongest two-month period of hiring seen since the start of the year. But disruptions from a resurgence in coronavirus cases threaten to depress those hiring rates.

It’s possible that increased measures to mitigate the spread of the Delta variant will stall or reverse gains, according to the report “especially in fields like the arts and education, where capacity limits and shut-downs can have significant impact on employment.”

Over all, nonprofits employ roughly 614,860 fewer workers than in February 2020, when the sector accounted for 12.5 million jobs. Since January, nonprofits have recovered an average of 49,440 jobs per month. At that rate, it would take just over a year from July for nonprofits to reach prepandemic employment levels.

The increase in July was driven by hiring among education nonprofits, which added more than 28,300 jobs last month. Still, employment at education nonprofits are more than 8 percent smaller than before the pandemic, when it employed slightly more than 2 million people.

Health-care nonprofits added nearly 16,000 jobs in July. That subset of nonprofits remains 3.2 percent smaller than the 6.7 million jobs workers held pre-pandemic.

Nonprofits in the broadly defined religious, grant-making and civic sector — a field that includes foundations, churches, and public-policy advocacy groups , for example — added 10,200 jobs in July, and social-assistance nonprofits added 13,000.

The Hopkins analysis uses federal unemployment data to estimate job gains and losses based on the proportion of nonprofit employers in different industries.