Nonprofit Organizations: Overview

Nonprofit organizations include everything from neighborhood associations that meet a couple of times a year and have no assets to Harvard University and the Gates Foundation, each with tens of billions in assets. They include soup kitchens and traditional "charities" that serve the poor as well as your local church, the Chamber of Commerce, the Sierra Club, the United Steel Workers labor union, and the Metropolitan Opera. As you can see, there's no "one-size-fits-all" way to think about nonprofit organizations.

So we categorize. Nonprofit organizations can be divided by the subsection of the United States Internal Revenue Code 501(c) under which they fall. Click on the categories below to learn more: