Two-thirds of America’s Nonprofits Are Sounding the Alarm. We Should Listen.
There’s a stretch of America you probably won’t see until it’s gone.
It’s the diaper bank that keeps a young mother from missing her shift. The community radio station that broadcasts a tornado warning to a town the cell towers forgot. The gang intervention program in Massachusetts that kept young men out of prison. The food pantry that fed your neighbor in November when SNAP benefits got slashed. We don’t think about these places the way we think about a grocery store or a hospital. They’re just there, doing the quiet work of holding the country together. Right now, that work is buckling.
A new survey released this week by the Center for Effective Philanthropy found that 66% of the 380 large nonprofit CEOs polled in February said they’re worried about their organization’s financial stability. The share reporting a deficit, meaning more money flowing out than coming in, jumped to 39% from 22% in 2022. Nearly three quarters of those leaders say demand for their services has gone up, even as the dollars to meet that demand have dried up. The publication, Axios, called it a sector in crisis.
Most of us never grasp the scale. According to a report from the Urban Institute, government grants to nonprofits total at least $240 billion a year, more than double what every American foundation gives combined. That same report found that in 2023, there wasn’t a single congressional district in the country where the typical grant-receiving-nonprofit could have covered its expenses without government funding. Not one. The sector employs roughly 12.7 million people, about 10% of all private sector workers, and contributes around 5.2% of GDP. This isn’t a charity bake sale. It’s infrastructure.
And it’s being yanked out from under us, piece by piece.
Public broadcasting got hit first. According to NPR, Congress rescinded $1.1 billion in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting last July, ending nearly 60 years of bipartisan support overnight. PBS cut 15% of its workforce. NPR CEO Katherine Maher told CBS that 70 to 80 of the network’s 246 member stations could go dark. In Eureka, California, the local PBS affiliate KEET TV is facing a loss of $847,000, nearly half its operating budget, according to CalMatters. Those are the stations broadcasting emergency alerts in rural counties where commercial radio gave up years ago. When they go silent, so does the warning system.
The White House argues that private donors can pick up the slack and that what’s being cut is just “ideological pet projects.” That framing doesn’t survive the numbers. The Department of Justice pulled funding from the Massachusetts gang intervention program that, according to WCVB, had reduced prison recidivism and had passed Congress with bipartisan support. Domestic violence shelters, suicide hotlines, Meals on Wheels, opioid recovery clinics. None of those are partisan either.
So what do we do? Nonprofits are slashing budgets and chasing grants harder, but survival now requires more. It means private donors stepping up the way the Knight and MacArthur foundations did with a $50 million emergency fund for public media. It means state and local governments backfilling where they can. It means diversifying revenue, building reserves, and telling our communities what would actually disappear if these doors closed. And it means us. Recurring monthly gifts. Volunteer hours. A phone call to your member of Congress.
We built this safety net together over sixty years. We can let it collapse quietly, or we can decide it’s worth keeping. There isn’t a third option. Go beyond the headlines…
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