Accountability, responsibility, and 'success' among medical NGOs in Central America
Author
Lightner, HannahOther Contributors
Nancy D. (Nancy Dianne), 1963-; Kinchy, Abby J.; Gordon, Tamar;Date Issued
2021-05Subject
Science and technology studiesDegree
MS;Terms of Use
This electronic version is a licensed copy owned by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY. Copyright of original work retained by author.; Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United StatesMetadata
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This paper seeks to examine how registered, 501(c)3 short-term medical missions (STMMs) create and define accountability, responsibility, and success within their organization. To explore this question, a survey measuring volunteer motivations was cross-analyzed with volunteer-written blogs to identify common themes and motivations among volunteers. These themes were then compared to coded interviews of STMM representatives to see how STMMs are holding themselves accountable and responsible, and if their accountability measures were consistent throughout their mission and vision statements or through the perception of volunteers. The results of this study found that STMMs seem to be holding themselves mostly accountable to their volunteer base and communities they are serving, while also catering much of their STMM ‘experience’ to their volunteer base. A secondary finding of this study was that although the COVID-19 pandemic has temporarily changed international volunteering for the time being, it likely will have profound effects on the international volunteering community as they have rapidly evolved to meet the challenging demands of the pandemic. Overall, this study highlights the need for emphasizing, while simultaneously changing, traditional methods and measures of accountability within the international development field;Description
May 2021; School of Humanities, Arts, and Social SciencesDepartment
Dept. of Science and Technology Studies;Publisher
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NYRelationships
Rensselaer Theses and Dissertations Online Collection;Access
CC BY-NC-ND. Users may download and share copies with attribution in accordance with a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. No commercial use or derivatives are permitted without the explicit approval of the author.;Collections
Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as CC BY-NC-ND. Users may download and share copies with attribution in accordance with a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. No commercial use or derivatives are permitted without the explicit approval of the author.