Thursday, August 28, 2014

Regional Non-Profits and Tax Exempt Organizations

TaxExemptWorld.com is a website that serves as an information service. In their words, the website "is not affiliated or associated with any tax exempt/nonprofit organizations. The data on this website is public record information made available by the Federal Government and was most recently updated on 1/5/2014. There are over 2 million tax exempt/nonprofit organizations with Income of over $3 trillion dollars and Assets of almost $7 trillion dollars!"

While I have no way of knowing how accurate those figures are, the website does provide some interesting information on tax exempt organization by county. Data for both Herkimer County and Oneida County tax exempt and nonprofit organizations are on the website. The data includes the total number of organizations, their income, and the value of their assets within each county. There is also a full listing of what organizations are considered tax exempt or non-profit, but to be honest the list appears a bit out of date despite the claim that it was updated in January of this year.

Regardless, it is another resource when researching the impact of local non-profits. Within the ACS of the US Census Bureau, workers are classified such that those that workers within charitable, nonprofit, or tax exempt organizations can be pulled out and examined as a group. Below are just a few of the types of data that you can find allowing for a comparison of employees who work for nonprofit organizations and those that work in any other type of job.

For example, roughly 12,500 people work for nonprofits in the region. This is about 9% of the workforce, or one out of every eleven jobs.

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The non-profit workforce is overwhelmingly female - far more so than the rest of the workforce. Two out of every three workers in the nonprofit sector are female. Among all other workers, less than half of the rest of their workforce is female.


Both nonprofit workers and the rest of the workforce have similar experiences with marriage. Roughly two out of three have ever been married, and around half are presently married.


In terms of a variety of social and cultural factors, more of the nonprofit workforce is black, and more of it is disabled, than compared to the rest of the workforce. They are less likely, however, to be Hispanic, or to be foreign born.

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One of the areas where nonprofit employees (as a group) clearly out perform other workers is in terms of educational attainment. Compared to for-profits employees, governmental employees and self employed workers, employees of nonprofits are considerably more likely to have a bachelors degree or higher. Nearly 40% of nonprofit workers have a bachelors or higher, whereas only about a quarter of the rest of the workforce has a similar level of education.