Giving USA 2012 Indicates Long, Slow, Uphill Slog…If We Are Lucky - NPQ – Nonprofit Quarterly - Promoting an active and engaged democracy.

Giving USA 2012 Indicates Long, Slow, Uphill Slog…If We Are Lucky - NPQ – Nonprofit Quarterly - Promoting an active and engaged democracy.: If there is one takeaway for most nonprofits from this year’s Giving USA Report, it is that many nonprofits will be acutely feeling the effects of the recession for many years to come. This is unhappy news for many groups who may already feel that they have had to cut into their musculature to survive.

But before we address the numbers, we have one caveat: not everyone will feel the worst effects of this recession. Some organizations have done extraordinarily well over the past few years, but that is precisely what makes these numbers bad news for many. When the charitable giving numbers are relatively flat and some nonprofits are doing extraordinarily well, conversely, that means some are doing much worse than usual. Thus, we see some groups failing either because they are in a troubled field, or because they are in an economically troubled geographic region, or because they never had much to spare to begin with and the recession has rendered them too spare to survive.