President Barack Obama will be addressing the country tonight on what will most likely be a pretty awful jobs outlook.  Growth is stagnant and some are speculating that the Great Recession is about to take a double dip into the red.

Miraculously, the nonprofit sector has seemingly bucked the national trend.  Idealist.org, the largest nonprofit job search engine in the United States, recently reported that hiring from the site was up almost 14 percent in the month of August.  The number of jobs posted to the site passed 10,000 in July, a record high.

The Idealist.org survey is echoed in broader national data published this month by the Johns Hopkins University Center for Civil Society Studies which makes the astounding claim that nonprofit job growth has actually increased during the recession compared to numbers from 2001-2007.

Why this matters to New Yorkers? New York City has not only the largest concentration of nonprofits in the United States, but the industry is also the largest private employer in the five boroughs with nearly $20 billion in annual payroll according to a 2009 study from the Fiscal Policy Institute.

Experts have been noticing that the New York City economy has managed to maintain a respectable level of buoyancy in 2011, despite serious slowdowns elsewhere.  Recent numbers on nonprofit industry growth only reinforce this popular analysis.

So while President Obama prepares for what could be the most depressing speech of his tenure, keep in mind that Mayor Bloomberg is most certainly not suffering the same fate. In fact, he has plenty to be excited about.