When schools and daycares shuttered, when food and other supply chains broke, who delivered baby supplies to parents juggling virtual work and young children? Who opened emergency childcare centers for the frontline workers who didn’t have the luxury of working from home? Who brought food to housebound elders?

It wasn’t for-profit companies. The nonprofit sector, along with community-based mutual aid networks, stepped up to meet immediate needs. If we want nonprofits to support us in the next crisis, they must have sufficient resources. And to know what nonprofits need to do their jobs effectively, we must ask them directly.

To that end, the Nonprofit Finance Fund conducted its ninth national State of the Nonprofit Sector Survey in the first quarter of 2022 to ask nonprofits about how they were faring and their resource needs during this once-in-a-generation moment. We sought to understand the financial situation of nonprofits writ large during the pandemic and racial reckonings, focusing on organizations led by people of color. We gathered a sizable national sampling of 374 BIPOC-led organizations, 719 white-led organizations, and 75 organizations whose leaders’ racial or ethnic identities spanned multiple categories, none of the presented categories, or was unknown.

Disaggregating by race allowed us to do a meaningful comparison when answering questions like, “Did organizations have the resources to meet changed community needs? Were they able to keep up with service demand? Did all organizations have equitable access to funding?” Some of the results surprised us in a positive way; others did not.

Read the full article about protecting nonprofit organizations by Aisha Benson and Jen Talansky at Nonprofit Quarterly.