Participation Strategies of Activist-Volunteers in the Life Cycle of Community Crisis

The aim of this paper is to propose a strategy for the management of activist-volunteers' participation in the cycle of a community crisis. The proposal, as outlined in the paper, is based on a nominal group process of 45 activist-volunteers, employees and directors along the confrontation line with Lebanon on the northern border of Israel. Participants were all veterans of previous crises. The nominal group process examined eight participation characteristics: areas of participation, level of influence, selection of activist-volunteers, definition of the organizational-political system, level of decentralization, participation forum and its size, use of tactics and intensity of participation. These were matched to four phases of community crisis (warning, shock, organizing and change). The findings of the study show that there is a need to build a variable participation strategy, composed of a different mix of components of the selected participation characteristics.