Nonprofit organizations, are you in financial shape to survive into the future? How is the economic downturn affecting your operations?

BY JAMES E. UKROP AND CHARLES E. AGEE III Every day in communities statewide, Virginians—from single mothers to working families to widowed elderly—benefit from a wide range of health, cultural, and social services. Consider just a few of the thousands of needs met by a group of independent institutions—Virginia’s nonprofit organizations—that together constitute the state’s second-largest employer:

One in 17 employees in Virginia worked for a nonprofit organization in 2005. Collectively, the paid work force of about 211,000 nonprofit employees earned more than $8.2 billion in wages. And that covers only paid employees.

Nonprofits. The word provokes images of feeding the poor, healing the sick, or sheltering the destitute—all true. But nonprofits are big business in Virginia. And, surprisingly, only one in seven is devoted to social assistance. The release this week of preliminary results from an economic impact study of Virginia's and its regions' nonprofit sector by Johns Hopkins University is important to every citizen of the commonwealth. It tells us a heretofore untold story. The nonprofit community is a tremendous financial and employment contributor to the growth and viability of Virginia, and particularly its capital region.