Charitable giving increased by 6.6 percent in the second quarter of 2022, even while the number of donors declined by 7 percent, an analysis from Independent Sector (IS) finds.

The report, Health of the U.S. Nonprofit Sector: A Quarterly Review (15 pages PDF), an overview of U.S. government data highlighting the nonprofit sector’s economic contributions, human capital, and activity, indicates a reversion to pre-pandemic trends showing a decline over more than a decade in the number of individual donors even as charitable giving continues to reach all-time records. The number of donors who gave less than $100 decreased 17.4 percent year-over-year, and those giving between $101 and $500 fell by 8.4 percent, while donors who gave more than $50,000 showed no decline.

The report’s authors found that racial and ethnic diversity within the nonprofit sector remains largely unchanged. As of the third quarter of 2022, the proportion of white workers (76 percent) remained higher than pre-pandemic levels (approximately 70 percent) indicating that the disproportionate effect of the pandemic on the employment of non-white staff remains unresolved, particularly for Hispanic workers whose participation in the nonprofit workforce declined by 2.8 percent—echoing similar findings from a 2022 report from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

According to IS, the report is also a call to action, highlighting disparities in federal reporting. The report noted that even though the nonprofit sector is the country’s third-largest private workforce—contributing $1.5 trillion per quarter to national GDP—the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics does not release quarterly employment and wage data for the sector. Nonprofits “serve as the essential and trusted delivery agents for government programs at all levels,” the report’s authors added. “Given the essential role filled by nonprofit workers, it is simply unacceptable that the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not release nonprofit data on a quarterly basis as it does for other industries.”

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