Maryland's largest private employer cuts paychecks for more than 46,000 - practically enough people to fill every seat in Camden Yards - and is adding jobs at the rate of 1,000 a year.
Not bad for an operation that doesn't turn a profit.
The growth at the Johns Hopkins Institutions is emblematic of the larger world of nonprofit groups, which are creating jobs in Maryland much more rapidly than for-profit companies. Because of the growing demand for health care, college education and social services, this so-called third sector has trumped business and government job growth nationwide in recent years.
Nonprofit groups are also behaving much more like entrepreneurs, seeking out new revenue sources and, to raised eyebrows, at times paying their top executives lucratively.
"This has become a much more complex sector, for better or worse," said Lester M. Salamon, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies. "It's a sign of its adjustment to new realities."
The good news has a flip side: With nonprofit groups apt to locate in struggling urban areas to fulfill their mission, cities depend on them for jobs and are frustrated by their tax-exempt status. Baltimore's City Council is expected to vote today on whether to tax its nonprofit groups for several services to help prevent hundreds of government layoffs.
The sector has enormous variety beyond its tax-exempt common ground. There are nonprofit theaters, hospitals, adult tutoring centers, day-care operations, museums, high schools, immigrant self-help networks, youth groups and professional associations, to name a few.
Their total employment ballooned 60 percent faster than did for-profit jobs between 1992 and 2002, according to the Center for Civil Society Studies. Nonprofit groups grew through the recession when other businesses shrank. All told, nonprofit organizations produce nearly 10 percent of Maryland's jobs, about 224,000 in 2002. That's a bigger slice of the employment pie than construction, manufacturing, financial activities or state government.
Even in Baltimore, where social ills fester beneath a persistent employment leak, nonprofit groups are expanding. There they account for one out of five jobs. "It truly is the only growing industry that Baltimore City has," said Peter V. Berns, executive director of the Maryland Association of Nonprofit Organizations.
Hopkins is an obvious example, from the hospital to the recently expanded Peabody Institute.
