A few years back, I wrote an internal concept paper that proposed a pseudo-census of the Jewish nonprofit sector. I wanted to do a rigorous, multi-phase research project that would not only tell us how many Jewish nonprofits exist in North America, but also how many people they employ, how many board members sit on their boards, and where they are. I dreamed of a map, a catalogue, a dataset with rows upon rows and columns upon columns of data. To those of you who are kindred spirits in data, who are reading this and can truly visualize that dream and are excited by it, I say to you: fingers crossed, one day! But not yet.

Honestly, I’ve wanted to do this for nearly a decade. I’ve been fortunate enough to have been part of every survey Leading Edge has launched to the field and to have supported hundreds of Jewish nonprofits through the survey tools we’ve built. In the early days of my tenure with Leading Edge, we were looking to understand what our “sandbox” looked like and today, over 85,000 survey responses later, I want to be able to contextualize our reach even more.

Our First Estimate

I first read Paul Burstein’s 2011 article “Jewish Nonprofit Organizations in the U.S.: A Preliminary Survey” in a graduate school class in 2015 (shoutout to the Hornstein program at Brandeis University!) and was intrigued by the methodology and the calculations — a third of our sector are synagogues, two-thirds fall under a national/umbrella entity, and there are more classifications of Jewish nonprofits than I was aware of at the time. A decade later, this study still sits at the center of the most-frequently-cited Jewish nonprofit sector estimates. Using IRS filings of 990s starting in 2009, Burstein provided a foundational analysis estimating around 9,500 Jewish nonprofits in the United States. 

In the early days of my tenure at Leading Edge, we used this number to help us get some sense of how many people are employed in the Jewish Nonprofit sector. First, we divided an estimate of total jobs in the US nonprofit sector (12.3 million, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2016) by an estimate of total nonprofit organizations in the US (1.6 million, according to The National Center for Charitable Statistics in 2016) to yield an average of 7.68 employees per nonprofit organization. Then we use Burstein’s 9,500 Jewish nonprofit organizations figure and assume that the Jewish nonprofit sector does not significantly deviate from the US national nonprofit average for average number of employees, with which we come up with an estimate of ~73,000 people working in the Jewish nonprofit sector.

In 2023, JPro (which, much more recently, joined together with Leading Edge) queried the field through national and umbrella organizations to get fresh counts for the number of organizations and employees in our field and calculated that there are 6,518 organizations and 121,178 employees. 

No estimate has been perfect for defining our “sandbox” but…

AI Validation

As large language models (LLMs) have become more powerful recently, I’ve wondered: could AI help test our estimates? As the fastest-growing technology to date (according to Forbes), it has experienced incredible diversification in its capabilities, which can sometimes feel overwhelming to keep up with. On Feb 2, 2025, ChatGPT added an exciting new feature — Deep Research — “an agent that uses reasoning to synthesize large amounts of online information and complete multi-step research tasks for you.” What fun!

Let’s try it…

Surprising Results

When we first asked Deep Research to look into this, it returned an essay that relied heavily on… Leading Edge and JPro! It used our estimate, the one we were trying to test. But after some course correction, it made a new estimate, scrupulously excluding Leading Edge and JPro from its sources, and relying most on estimates of the component categories of organization types in our sector.

What was truly surprising, in this second round of results, was to see that we may not have been that far off all along! 

Here is a table that summarizes what Chat GPT - Deep Research was able to gather:

Assuming that there are uncategorized organizations and uncharacterized employees, we can conservatively estimate 10,000 orgs and 120,000 employees in the sector. ChatGPT is conservatively estimating an average of 12 board members per organization at 9,000 organizations which we adjusted for the 10,000 count to arrive at 120,000 board members, a cautious estimate. 

Moving forward with some confidence

The journey of re-estimating the population of the Jewish nonprofit sector has not reached its conclusion. I still strongly believe that we need to conduct a rigorous, research-backed count of the sector as I dreamed it. After all, Deep Research can only base itself on the imperfect information publicly available to it on the internet. “Garbage in, garbage out,” goes the saying, and while the publicly available information isn’t “garbage,” it’s also quite far from comprehensive! We need more.

Still, this exercise of using AI to re-examine the sources we have can strengthen our confidence, to some degree, in some of our past assumptions. 

As we continue to gather data and refine our estimates, it is essential to contextualize our findings within the broader landscape of nonprofit organizations. A dual approach — leveraging research data while embracing innovative technology — can allow us to pave the way for a more informed, engaged, and impactful Jewish nonprofit sector. Imagine being able to know how large our tent truly is — and to know not only who they are, but where they are. 

One day, I hope to say that the sector is able to leverage resources and communal knowledge to enhance the lives of XXX,XXX of Jewish nonprofit professionals at XX,XXX organizations, as a fact and not an estimate. 

Until then, at least we have our robot friends.