Nonprofits play sizable role in NNY employment

As their numbers increase, nonprofits — and public charities, in particular — play an increasingly important employment role in Northern New York.

According to the state Department of Labor, nonprofits employed 10,732 people in Jefferson, Lewis and St. Lawrence counties in the second quarter of 2000. Seven years later, the number had increased to 12,205, or by 13.7 percent, far outstripping the overall 4.6 percent growth in employment in all sectors.

"A lot of people create them for their community," said Douglas Sauer, executive director of the Council of Community Services of New York State. "We have had growth in nonprofits in housing programs, developmental disabilities services, economic development agencies and large arts organizations."

Mr. Sauer warned that a greater number of employees may not mean that the workers are getting salaries equivalent to those in the private sector. But some national research shows nonprofits pay runs above average in some fields.

The Disabled Persons Action Organization has added 70 to 80 positions over the past five years, said Executive Director Joseph L. Rich.

The staff at the Children's Home of Jefferson County has grown from 88 employees in 2003 to 150 now, said Director Karen Y. Richmond.

Since Mary M. Morgan became Watertown Urban Mission's executive director in February 2005, the agency has added about 10 full- and part-time staff members. All but one work in the thrift store, Impossible Dream. The income from the store supports many of the charity's programs.

"If you don't have people to move merchandise, you can't do the other programs," Miss Morgan said.

John M. Turongian, chief executive officer of United Helpers Care Inc., Ogdensburg, said his organization grew quickly in the 1990s and early this decade.

"It hasn't grown all that much in the last five or six years," he said. "Before that, there was a shift from state-sponsored to nonprofit programs."

In 1990, United Helpers had 500 employees. Now, the organization has 850.

"In our case, we've stabilized our growth because of merging, reduced costs and doing some things to economize," Mr. Turongian said.

Employment is a good means of tracking overall nonprofit growth, according to a study by the Center for Civil Society Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

"This is so because nonprofit organizations tend to operate in fields that are highly labor intensive," according to a December 2006 report. The study, "Employment in America's Charities: A Profile," took a comprehensive look at nonprofits' employment and salaries across the United States.

Those labor-intensive fields include health care and social assistance and educational services. In Northern New York, the state Department of Labor reports that 67 percent of nonprofits employment is in health care and social assistance — a field including everything from hospitals to food pantries.

An additional 16 percent of nonprofits employment is in educational services, for example, colleges and universities.

"Nonprofits are more visible than they used to be because so many manufacturing facilities have left the area," said Mr. Turongian of United Helpers. "Employers, particularly nonprofits, have to be flexible and ready to change when the need arises."

In 2006, state Labor Department data show, the average annual wages in Jefferson, Lewis and St. Lawrence counties were $31,774. The two industry categories with high concentrations of nonprofits employment had slightly higher averages.

In educational services, wages averaged $32,842, and in health care and social assistance, the average wages were $32,912.

That does not necessarily mean that employees of nonprofits made more than their for-profit counterparts. It means that service-intensive industries also contain many nonprofit organizations.

But the national study done by Johns Hopkins does show that employees in some fields may make more in nonprofit companies than for-profit companies. According to the 2004 data the researchers collected, for-profits outpaced nonprofits $669 to $627 in weekly pay.

But in many health and social assistance fields, nonprofits employees averaged higher pay. They made $752 per week, compared with $706 for for-profit employees in hospitals, $641 versus $506 in educational services and $390 versus $311 in social assistance

"While nonprofit wages on average are lower than for-profit wages, this difference seems largely due to the fact that nonprofits are concentrated in generally low-wage fields," according to the study.