“Why can’t this work here?”: social innovation and collective impact in a micropolitan community

ABSTRACT

Cross-sector partnerships, and collective impact, in particular, have gained increased attention as community-level strategies for tackling wicked, complex, social challenges such as child maltreatment. To date, there has been limited independent research on collective impact, especially in non-metropolitan areas with limited capacity. This case study examines the conditions that supported the development of a collective impact effort in a non-metropolitan community to address child wellbeing. It finds that small communities offer strengths that support collective impact as a social innovation as well as challenges that create vulnerabilities to outside influence that may stymie the development of locally developed social innovations.

KEYWORDS:

• Case study
• collective impact
• community resilience
• micropolitan
• social innovation

Availability of data and material

Due to confidentiality concerns, data generated by this study is only available by reasonable request to the corresponding author. Competing interests: N/A

Authors’ contributions

The author designed the study, carried out the data collection and analysis, and wrote the manuscript

Acknowledgments

The author would like to acknowledge the contributions to the project by LaDonna Wirth, Lee Sherry, and Cailen O’Shea. All errors are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The US Census defines a rural area as any area outside of an urban cluster of at least 2,500 people and defines a micropolitan area as defined as a labor market area on an urban cluster with a population of at least 10,000 but fewer than 50,000 people. Northeast Prairie is a micropolitan community of approximately 25,000, located in a non-metropolitan county, which according to the USDA ERS (USDA, 2017) consists of a combination of open countryside, rural towns of less than 2,500 residents, and urbanized areas of between 2,500 and 49,000. Northeast Prairie serves as a retail and service hub for the rest of the county and a larger, primarily agricultural region, resulting in a large number of low wage jobs in fast food and big box retail establishments, which contribute to a median income that is approximately $7,000 below the state median (U.S. Census, 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by an Extension Partnership grant at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.