Last November, during the federal shutdown that stopped food benefits cold, more than 102,000 Rhode Islanders turned to the charitable food network in a single month. That is the highest figure the Rhode Island Community Food Bank has ever recorded, higher than anything it saw during the pandemic.
A record like that gets announced quietly, because there is no good way to say out loud that more of your neighbors ran out of options than ever before.
What the number also produced, in a way almost nobody counts, was work. Somebody at each of the Food Bank’s 137 partner agencies ordered the food, packed the boxes, answered the phones, chased the grant that paid for it, and stayed past closing when the line still wrapped around the building. At Higher Ground International on Providence’s Ninigret Avenue, that meant sourcing groceries West African families would actually cook with, from vendors who don’t offer nonprofit rates. At Southside Community Land Trust, it meant food grown on city lots. At Meals on Wheels of Rhode Island, it meant somebody behind the wheel gets compensated for working an extra shift to keep up with demand.
I have spent my career working with organizations such as these, as a consultant and from inside their leadership teams, and the people carrying that work almost never come up when Rhode Island talks about its economy.
Consider the scale. In a report published last June, the Department of Labor and Training counted 1,443 tax-exempt employers in Rhode Island paying more than $4.5 billion in wages during 2024. Those employers carry 65,972 workers, or 15.2 percent of every private-sector job in the state.
Tax-exempt describes a filing status, nothing more. The category holding Brown University Health and Providence’s universities also holds Crossroads Rhode Island, Sojourner House, The Elisha Project, Aquidneck Community Table, and neighborhood organizations running on few employees and a part-time bookkeeper. What those institutions share is not their finances. It is that Rhode Island has quietly built a large share of its health, education, and social infrastructure on organizations never designed to operate like conventional businesses. Set against all of it, the same agency counts 39,247 people in manufacturing statewide. Rhode Island’s identity runs on the mills, but its payroll runs on this.
You almost certainly know a few of those 65,972 without ever having thought of them as a workforce. The woman at the group home where your cousin lives, the case manager at the domestic violence shelter, the match support specialist at Big Brothers Big Sisters who matched your neighbor’s kid with somebody who showed up every week, the outreach worker downtown who knows every person sleeping outside by name. Whoever picks up the phone at a housing agency when somebody calls two days before an eviction, and the policy analyst who carries that call log into a hearing at the State House. Some hold social work degrees. Some were hired to keep the money coming in so the lights stay on. Some came up in the community they now serve, which is the reason the program functions at all.
The trouble starts when a single average gets asked to describe all of them at once.
DLT puts average wages across the tax-exempt sector at $68,776, on par with the $66,498 paid by taxable employers, which read quickly sounds like the work pays fine. But nearly 87 percent of those jobs sit in health care and social assistance and in education, and under federal classification the health care and social assistance category alone stretches across hospitals, community health centers, nursing homes, group homes, child care, youth programs, shelters, and food assistance. One average, 39,076 workers, and a range that wide underneath it.
For what the smaller end of that range actually pays, we finally have current numbers. In February, the Alliance for Nonprofit Impact at United Way of Rhode Island released the 2025 Rhode Island Nonprofit Survey, built on responses from 238 organizations collected in December and January. Asked what they pay their lowest-paid employees, 10 percent said $15.00 an hour, which was the state minimum wage the month the survey opened. Another 38 percent said between $15.01 and $20. Nearly half of Rhode Island’s nonprofits, in other words, have somebody on payroll earning $20 dollars an hour or less.
At the other end of the org chart, 14 percent said their executive director and senior leaders are unpaid entirely, and another 13 percent pay their top executive under $50,000.
Benefits follow the same pattern. Two-thirds offer health coverage, just under half offer retirement, and 16 percent offer none of the above. Among those providing health benefits, 64 percent say costs are rising more than 15 percent in 2026, to be handled by splitting the increase with employees or absorbing it into a budget with nowhere left to absorb anything.
So people leave, and the survey is blunt about why. Seventy-seven percent of organizations report staff experiencing burnout, with a third saying many or all of their staff are burned out. Half report that at least some of their people are contemplating leaving the nonprofit sector entirely, and a third have already watched someone go. Among organizations that tried to hire in 2025, a third had positions sit open for three months or longer. The survey names the primary obstacle to recruitment in plain language: low wages and salaries in the Rhode Island nonprofit sector.
Every one of those exits takes something with it that no successor inherits. The caseworker who quits also knew which landlord on that block accepts a voucher, the youth worker who quits is the one that particular fifteen-year-old actually talked to, and none of that institutional memory shows up anywhere in an offboarding checklist.
Here is the part that rarely gets said plainly in Rhode Island, and it is the reason I wanted to write this at all: These wages are largely not the doing of stingy nonprofit executives, because they are set upstream, long before any director sees them.
I have sat in the meeting where an executive director stares at a spreadsheet and picks between a cost-of-living raise for six people and making payroll through June. That decision is arithmetic performed on a budget somebody else set, under a contract somebody else wrote. A state contract pays a reimbursement rate that has not moved in years and carries no adjustment for inflation. A foundation grant funds the program but restricts spending on salaries and caps indirect costs below what the work requires. Both run twelve months at a time, which means no director in this state can promise anyone a raise fourteen months out, or a job.
Then look at what happened to the money last year. The survey found federal funding down on net by 31 percent among respondents, state funding down 11 percent, and corporate grants down 14 percent, while 77 percent reported expenses going up. Foundation giving split, 30 percent of organizations losing ground and 25 percent gaining, which says priorities shifted rather than budgets grew. Southside Community Land Trust lost $600,000 to federal freezes.
What is left is a balance sheet with no give in it. Only a quarter hold six months of cash reserves. Four in five named financial instability as their greatest concern for 2026, with no other issue close. Nearly half expect to restructure staff this year, and more than a quarter are weighing whether to cut programs outright.
Rhode Island has made nonprofits responsible for an extraordinary share of the work that keeps people housed, fed, safe, and connected to care. Then it funded that work in a way that leaves almost nothing for paying the people who do it.
We do not have to speculate about whether any of this can change, because the state already ran the experiment. Rhode Island deliberately raised direct support wages, the pay for workers who staff group homes at providers like Perspectives Corporation and the Trudeau Center, from $18.94 an hour in late 2022 to $21.12 by mid-2024. Over the same stretch, turnover among those workers fell from 21 percent to 15 percent and vacancies dropped from 17 percent to 12 percent.
That result points toward four things worth doing.
Measure this workforce properly. DLT should report nonprofit employment by subsector and employer size, with median wages alongside averages. A table blending a hospital system with a food pantry answers nothing, and the Alliance should not have to survey 238 organizations to surface what the state already collects.
Fund government contracts at the real cost of delivering the service, wages included. That means rates built on actual labor costs, annual inflation adjustments, and multi-year terms that let providers plan past June.
Move philanthropy toward multi-year general operating support with honest indirect-cost allowances, since restricted program dollars that forbid spending on salaries ask organizations to deliver labor without paying for it. Corporate Rhode Island has a particular reckoning here, because corporate grants to this sector fell on net last year while demand rose. Keep buying the table at the annual breakfast, then add an unrestricted check behind it.
Build wage growth into grants and contracts rather than treating raises as administrative excess, so a budget line for compensation increases becomes as ordinary as a line for rent.
Last year a case manager I know left a Providence organization for a health insurer, after six years working one neighborhood. The new job paid about $18,000 more and asked her to carry none of it home at night. I don’t blame her for taking it. I would have taken it too.
The state paid for part of her position, a foundation paid for part, and donors covered whatever was left. Somewhere along that chain, everyone involved treated her paycheck as the flexible part.
Her clients got a new name and a new phone number and started their stories over. Six years of knowing which school counselor picks up on the first ring, which pharmacy will front a prescription, which family needs the call before the crisis instead of after, walked out the door with her. Nothing in the state’s accounting registered that as a loss
Editor’s note: We welcome Ray Nuñez as a regular contributor. Read another of his recent columns here. Ray is chief advancement officer at Big Brothers Big Sisters of Rhode Island.
