Nonprofit Financial Resilience: Recovery from Natural Disasters

Nonprofits operate in increasingly complex and turbulent environments. However, few studies have explored nonprofits’ resilience during natural disasters. This study uses Hurricane Katrina as a case study to explore whether nonprofits can regain their original financial performance after significant natural disasters and what organizational capacities and abilities influence their ability to bounce back. The results show that recovery is slow, taking between three and five years for half of the nonprofits in the sample. Recovery depends on factors such as organizational size, equity, surplus, and commercial revenue. This study enriches the nonprofit financial health literature and reveals that the factors associated with financial resilience are different from those that predict financial vulnerability.