A Profile of Nonprofit Organizations in the Greater New Orleans Metropolitan Area

Carol J. De Vita, Amy Blackwood, Katie L. Roeger

The New Orleans metropolitan area has faced several challenges in the past decade: Hurricane Katrina, the BP oil spill, and the Great Recession. Analysis of IRS Form 990 data and a survey of nonprofit human service providers find that local nonprofits employ 14,300 people and had 2010 expenditures of $558 million. While most have recovered from Katrina, one in four still uses disaster recovery funds. The lingering recession is placing financial pressure on human service providers, who operate on razor-thin margins: in 2010, revenues exceeded expenses by 0.4 percent. An appendix provides a fact sheet on each parish’s nonprofit sector.

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