Hundreds of nonprofit professionals are in Baltimore today for the Maryland Nonprofits? 14th annual conference.
Conference attendees will spend the day at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront Hotel focusing on communication, decision-making and the impact that an organization?s life cycle has on affecting change in the community.
“Just as people have life cycles and build relationships at different stages, organizations do the same thing,” said Anita Nowery Durel of Durel Consulting Partners, who also is past president of the Maryland chapter of Fundraising Professionals, an education and advocacy group for nonprofit fundraisers.
Durel and her husband, John W. Durel, are among about a dozen presenters at today?s conference, which is designed to help the growing number of Maryland nonprofits succeed.
“The number of nonprofits has grown so dramatically in the past 10 years because government no longer is meeting the needs that it previously did,” she said. “Nonprofits begin with an idea to make a difference in the world. With that idea, they form an organization to fulfill that need.”
There are 21,000 nonprofit organizations operating in Maryland, according to Trudy Jacobson, director of development with the Maryland Association of Nonprofit Organizations, host of today?s annual conference. There are more than 1 million nonprofit organizations nationwide, but the number includes education, health care and religious institutions.
“So many things that people count on to make their lives more comfortable they are looking to nonprofit organizations for,” Jacobson said.
As a result of the growing number of nonprofits, the number of jobs in the industry is setting records. A recent study by Johns Hopkins University found that jobs in the nonprofit sector grew 2 percent between 2003 and 2004 while jobs in the state?s for-profit sector grew at 1.8 percent.
“Our data show that this general trend has continued for the past decade with the nonprofit job growth rate [in Maryland] equaling or exceeding that of the for-profit sector in eight of the past 10 years,” Lester Salamon, director of the Center for Civil Society Studies at Hopkins? Institute for Policy Study, told Ascribe, a public-interest newswire service.
The Hopkins study found that nonprofit job growth was particularly vigorous in the professional and scientific services field, arts, entertainment and recreation, educational services and social assistance.
