Nonprofit mergers rising in Indiana and nationally

At a time of rising costs and struggles to find and retain federal funding, more and more nonprofit  organizations are merging are considering a merger to expand their services and strengthen the efficiency of their operations.

A survey conducted by Deloitte shows just how much the merger and acquisition landscape has shifted among nonprofits in just the past two years.

When about 100 nonprofit organizations were quizzed in July 2023, only 17% of board members reported having firsthand merger experience and more than 75% said they had never even considered a merger.

By July 2025, fewer than 20% of surveyed respondents reported dealmaking experience, but a whopping 75% said they had actively considered a merger.

In the Hoosier state, Goodwill of Central & Southern Indiana has been one of the nonprofits with the most M&A activity in recent years, including two major deals announced in 2025.

Kent Kramer, CEO of Goodwill of Central & Southern Indiana, told The Indiana Lawyer the organization’s 2017 merging of its central and southern Indiana organizations allowed it to introduce some program synergies that have proven beneficial in both parts of the state.

“We saw really good results from that merger, so we’ve always been open to doing that again,” Kramer said.

Goodwill looks to serve communities more efficiently

The Indianapolis-based organization opened in 1930 during the Great Depression in a basement community center.

Now, it serves 39 counties in Indiana, offering a variety of employment, education and health care services to help individuals become employable.

The Indiana Goodwill organization employs about 5,200 people and had total assets of $295 million in 2024.

It operates more than 75 retail locations, as well as contract manufacturing services, charter schools for adults and youth, a maternal-child health program and a child care center.

Goodwill and Horizon House announced in July that they had entered an agreement to merge the two organizations.

Horizon House, founded in 1988, is a daytime-only homeless shelter at 1033 E. Washington St. that provides services to the homeless such as health care, mental health services, storage, laundry and job training. It serves more than 5,000 homeless people a year.

Kramer said the merger with Horizon House came at a time when access to housing is one of the major issues faced by many people. It’s something Goodwill sees on a daily basis with the people it employs, educates and serves.

“We saw a huge need from a housing perspective and we wanted to lean into that,” Kramer said.

Goodwill’s second merger in 2025 involved the acquisition of Goodwill Industries of Central Illinois.

Kramer said that merger took six months to complete.

He said with any merger involving nonprofits, there are efforts to reduce overhead and increase efficiency of services.

A lot of factors have played into the interest in nonprofit mergers, Kramer said, whether that involves technology, rising costs, personnel costs and/or leases.

“Nonprofits operate on a pretty thin margin. So if you can combine two and bring efficiencies to your overhead, it can be a ‘win-win,’” Kramer said.

Nonprofit entities show interest in health care, higher ed mergers

Some attorneys who represent and interact with nonprofits have seen an general uptick in discussions about mergers in recent years.

Megan Okun, a partner with Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP’s Cincinnati office, said she’s seen increased interest in nonprofit mergers, although she added that actual completed mergers between nonprofits are still relatively uncommon.

“We see it across all sectors,” Okun said.

Okun said the heightened interest started during the COVID pandemic, with a lot of nonprofits looking at how they could cut costs.

She said higher education is another example of that trend, with universities, particularly smaller private ones, trying to think ahead five to 10 years and consider what the future looks like for their institutions in light of declining enrollment and funding issues.

According to the BestColleges website, which has been tracking major nonprofit college closures and mergers since 2020. at least 84 public or nonprofit colleges have closed, merged, or announced closures or mergers since March 2020.

At the end of 2024, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia developed a model to predict college closures, estimating that up to 80 colleges could close this year due to financial distress following a worst-case-scenario drop in enrollment. 

Okun said state attorneys general have an interest in keeping those schools and their assets in state, given the sizable endowments possessed by many universities.

Colleges also provide a boost, particularly in smaller cities, to local economies.

Suzannah Overholt, a partner with Amundsen Davis, said she works with nonprofit health care providers and has seen more of an interest with those entities to merge, with decreased funding and increased costs two major reasons.

Overholt said she’s been seeing more mergers in the last three or four years.

She said her practice used to assist with that type of merger once a year, but now it is usually two or more.

“But when you talk about the number of nonprofit safety net providers in the state, it’s a significant increase,” Overholt said.

Overholt expects the health care provider-related mergers to continue, especially with smaller entities looking for collaborators that will enable them to provide services they normally offer in the face of funding challenges.

There have also been nonprofit mergers involving economic development organizations.

Ted Ziemer, an attorney in Stoll Keenon Ogden’s Evansville office, said he works primarily as a transactional M&A attorney for for-profit companies.

Ziemer said he was involved in the 2021 merger of the Economic Development Coalition of Southwest Indiana, Growth Alliance for Greater Evansville, and Southwest Indiana Chamber— and their respective boards—when the three organizations merged into what is now the Evansville Regional Economic Partnership.

That merger followed the model of a similar merger that took place in San Antonio, Texas, Ziemer said, with the deal cutting down on some administrative costs and general redundancy of services between the Evansville groups.

“It just seemed appropriate to merge,” Ziermer said, adding, “by all accounts, it’s been a great success.”•