How Does Place Affect Access To "What Works?": Knowledge Usage In Urban And Rural Ngo Intervention Design
As a state often ranked last in health rankings of note, Mississippi stands to benefit greatly from health interventions developed and implemented by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). NGOs depend on governmental and private foundation support, and, precipitated by recent legislation, these funding sources increasingly require “evidence-based practices” (EBPs). NGOs must cope with and adapt to the added expertise, data collection, and evaluation necessary to meet these requirements, tapping into their social networks to gain access to capital across ties. However, urban and rural environments present different concentrations of institutions and organizations, perhaps resulting in unequal abilities for urban and rural NGOs to cope. To investigate the ways Mississippi NGOs are utilizing data to inform health interventions, I conducted in-depth interviews and surveys with NGO leaders in Jackson (n=6) and in the Delta region (n=10). While the findings do indicate rural NGOs have smaller social networks, navigation of these ties and capital exchange across them is complex. Rural organizations use their cultural capital within the community to negotiate the EBP boundary with funders, while urban NGOs align themselves with funders to reinforce the boundary. More than just individual interactions, NGOs develop social networks with different numbers and strengths of ties with different compositions of stakeholders as a consequence of their surrounding environments. Organizations share realities with proximate parties who influence, provide resources and knowledge, and hold organizations directly accountable for their actions drive the construction and maintenance of these networks, and shape the ways that rural and urban NGOs navigate their environments to carry out their missions.
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