Place and the Structuring of Cross-Sector Partnerships: The Moral and Material Conflicts Over Healthcare and Homelessness

Local places, such as communities, cities, and towns, host many cross-cross sector partnerships, many geared primarily toward alleviating local social and environmental issues. Yet, existing literatures focus predominantly on largescale systemic impact and global challenges such as climate change, paying scant attention to the role of local, geographically bounded dynamics in shaping these partnerships. In this article, I conceptualize places as geographic locations imbued with specific meaning systems and material resources to unpack how local embeddedness shape the structure of cross-sector partnerships. Specifically, I investigate how place-based conflict, arising from tensions between the moral and material aspects of a partnership, can shape formalized aspects of organizational structure. These include the scope of operations, partners’ roles, and shared resources. I unpack these relationships using a case study of Occupy Medical, a local partnership between the civic society and the local government in Eugene, Oregon, tackling the problem of providing healthcare to the homeless and other marginalized and disenfranchised communities. The analysis covers the nine-year period of 2011–2020 and spans three major restructurings of the organization, the latest prompted by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. I theorize two forms of structural arrangements for cross-sector partnerships, confined and leveraged, and further elaborate on the role of cross-sector partnerships in crises response on the local level.