Tens of Thousands Have Lost Nonprofit Jobs to Federal Cuts. Here Are 6 of Them

Since Donald Trump took office in January, nonprofits across the country have shed thousands of jobs as federal funding freezes exacerbated by longstanding funding cliffs devastate organizations focused on issues like climate change, immigration, and education.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy has been tracking such layoffs since January. Behind the statistics are tens of thousands of nonprofit workers, who in the past few months have been navigating an increasingly perilous landscape.

In the months since, they have balanced completing job-severance paperwork with volunteering for causes they are no longer paid for. They have grieved not just their own lost jobs but the systematic dismantling and defunding of work they believe in. With children to feed, rent to pay, and prescriptions to fill, they have wondered what will happen if they don’t find work soon.

Here are six of their stories.

Julie Keller, 42, Rochester, N.Y.

The ominous emails from executives began trickling in well before Inauguration Day, when case manager Julie Keller and her colleagues at Church World Service were working at a furious pace to get as many new refugee families settled before new immigration policies could be enacted by the second Trump administration.

“We heard from other staff that the first administration was brutal and caused many layoffs,” said Keller. “This time around, we expected it.”

That didn’t make it any easier when on his first day of office, President Donald Trump gutted the country’s decades-old refugee program. The six refugee families the group was expecting to welcome between Inauguration Day and the first of February never arrived. Then came furloughs for Keller and four colleagues in February, and finally formal layoffs in March. Of Rochester’s three resettlement agencies, all have endured large layoffs.

Keller spent years bouncing from job to job before landing on work in refugee settlement, falling in love with the responsibility of greeting newly arrived families at the airport and supporting them through their first few months in the country. Even months post-layoff, she’s still in touch with some of her roughly two dozen clients.

After one texted that he’d just received his American driver’s license, she spent a Friday afternoon shepherding him and his wife, both from Venezuela, to car dealerships around town.

“I really just love what I do,” said Keller, who is now looking for work in social services and considering pursuing her master’s degree if she can get the funding. “Having this taken away, it really stings.”

Bryan Hall, 49, Melrose, Mass.

Bryan Hall’s stomach lurched when a mysterious appointment appeared on his calendar. Having been laid off twice before, “your brain registers a certain traumatic response to random meetings just showing up on your calendar.”

His organization, the Boston-based Sperling Center for Research and Innovation, had already weathered one round of layoffs in October, a casualty of the funding cliff that hit education nonprofits when pandemic-era ESSER funding ended in the middle of last year. But with the election and the new administration, “everybody’s purses just tightened up,” he said. “Everybody got nervous. Everybody stopped spending money.”

When he logged onto the meeting, he found “a random consultant from HR” ready to walk him through his severance and tell him to return his laptop. His Slack access was already turned off.

“Fifteen years of work and commitment gone in 15 minutes,” said Hall, who has deep experience working in social science research across the nonprofit world, consulting with government agencies and other nonprofits on education policy.

News of the new layoffs spread quickly through an awkward “game of telephone,” he said. Former colleagues or employees reached out, not knowing he’d been laid off too. The nonprofit sector, he worries, “is going to lose a lot of really talented people. It’s never going to get back.”

Though has has climbed back from a layoff before, at 49 and with a house and mortgage to pay, “I just have a lot more to lose now,” he said.

“I never wanted to be somebody for whom my job was my life,” he said. “But then when that thing gets stripped from you, you realize how crucial it is to your sense of safety in the world.”

Shannon Sullivan, 28, Statesville, N.C.

Shannon Sullivan limits herself to just one job application per day “in order to retain my own sanity.” She’s already creeping toward 100 applications, all meticulously tracked in a spreadsheet.

The 28-year-old has spent her entire seven-year career in nonprofits, or even longer if you count her volunteer experience, which traces back to becoming a youth ambassador for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation after being diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at age 7. “The nonprofit roots run deep,” she said.

In January, she was laid off from her job managing digital communications for She Should Run, a nonprofit that helps women run for office, after months of dwindling donations and with many staff members disheartened “to see, once again, a woman running for president, and once again, a fairly brutal defeat.”

For now, Sullivan is back on her parents’ homestead in rural North Carolina. In between applying for jobs and trying “to avoid the doom-scroll of LinkedIn, she’s found time to take up woodworking, Irish language classes, guitar lessons, and bread-baking. She also has started a Substack newsletter.

In a way, she is grateful for the “privilege of just walking away from my phone” at a time when politics feels so volatile. “I’ve never given myself a full day between jobs before,” she said.

She’s thinking about pivoting away from politics entirely, and has been applying for jobs in arts and culture nonprofits. She’s also applied to some for-profit positions — the job market has forced her to cast a wider net — but she knows where her heart is.

“I’m holding out hope for nonprofits for now,” she said.

Adhira Johnson-Miller, 29, Newport News, Va.

When Commonwealth Catholic Charities, where she had just begun working as an immigration paralegal, was forced by a series of stop-work orders to cut two-thirds of its 30 staff members, Johnson-Miller survived the initial rounds because she spoke Spanish and some Arabic.

It was her first nonprofit job after working at a for-profit law office, and she’d quickly grown attached to her colleagues, many of whom were immigrants themselves. “Having a multicultural community in one office, everyone there was beyond nice,” she said.

Yet after weathering two stop-work orders in two months, Johnson-Miller was called into a meeting at 5 p.m. on a Friday. A grant had officially terminated at five o’clock, they told her, handing her a gift card as the only severance they could afford.

“It’s such a small city,” she said. “I wouldn’t imagine being directly affected by Trump’s changes.” But here she was, working with a recruiting agency to try to find other paralegal jobs and applying for unemployment.

“The mission was awesome. I miss everything about the job. It’s beautiful work,” said Johnson-Miller, who says she would return to Catholic Charities in a heartbeat though her family has warned her to be skeptical of applying to other nonprofits that could be dependent on single funding sources.

In the meantime, she’s counting down the 90 days she’s required to wait before she’ll be allowed back to volunteer for Catholic Charities Commonwealth, where she hopes to “at least try to check on a few cases, seeing where some people are.”

“Just because I’m laid off doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t try and volunteer my time,” she said.

Brandon Jirō Hayashi, 50, Honolulu, Hawaii

With Hawaii only weeks away from peak wildfire season, the timing couldn’t have been worse when Brandon Jirō Hayashi was laid off from the climate nonprofit Blue Forest in early April along with two colleagues.

“Every day we don’t do something in wildfire just makes it potentially critically worse down the road,” said Hayashi, who had worked as partnerships director, developing forest resilience bonds to prevent wildfires on federal lands.

“It’s not just that the funds weren’t flowing,” said Hayashi, whose former employer received about 30 percent of its budget from federal grants. The U.S. Forest Service employees he partnered with — the land managers who would be “on the other side of the table” negotiating wildfire prevention deals — have lost their jobs too.

With the second anniversary of the devastating 2023 Maui wildfires approaching in August, states like Hawaii have been trying with little avail to replace lost federal funds. “Even if the Aloha and the love is there, we don’t have millions of dollars,” he said. “We have thousands of dollars.”

Hayashi has picked up a short-term contract with the Nature Conservancy working on reef restoration financing mechanisms through the end of the month, but it’s temporary. At 50, with two teenagers and a toddler at home, and his wife’s physician job at the Department of Veterans Affairs feeling increasingly precarious, “our safety net only goes so far,” he said.

“If she ends up losing her job, then I don’t have the luxury of wanting to stay in nonprofits,” said Hayashi. “I have to do what is going to be putting food on the table sooner rather than later.”

Grace Mok, 28, Queens, N.Y.

Grace Mok found out she was being laid off through an HR glitch that erased her vacation days hours before the CEO of Rewiring America delivered the news. She called a colleague to confirm her suspicions and when her manager admitted in “the smallest, saddest voice” that he still had vacation days, she knew. “I started crying a little bit.”

The 28-year-old had worked for a year and a half managing corporate partnerships and federal lobbying for the clean-energy nonprofit, which lost access to federal greenhouse-gas reduction funds under Trump’s climate policy rollbacks.

Mok dropped a goodbye note in Slack 10 minutes before an all-hands meeting in which Rewiring America’s CEO announced that 28 percent of staff, including Mok, would be cut. Ten minutes later, she was logged out of Slack; 20 minutes after that, her email and Google Drive access disappeared.

Rewiring America’s severance package included nine weeks of pay and health insurance through 2025, which has given her some `time to decide what’s next. “I’ve been given my life raft off the ship,” she said. “I’m charting my own course.”

She’s planning to canvass for local campaigns while considering a pivot to political work, fighting back against the policies that cost her the job. She has also found time to write handwritten compost reminders for all 12 units in her building after New York City made composting mandatory.

Climate advocacy, she notes, offers plenty of ways to make incremental progress, paid or unpaid.

“The job was a vehicle for me to do things I want to do,” she said. “I’ll find another vehicle, but I remain the driver of my life.”