Insistent
What it means to be Insistent
Maintain social contact with community groups. Visit their arrangements and arrange a social occasion on a regular basis. Update information and maintain dialogue with groups and citizens through social media and email lists. Let them know you need them and expect their participation during joint exercises. Reconnect and evaluate preparedness exercises in a collective manner, utilizing social media and the digital infrastructure. Expect your collaborative partners to be knowledgeable about the relevant policy and principles governing crisis management.
- Recognize the advantage of staying in touch with community groups.
- Facilitate formalized structures of collaboration without specifying tasks in detail.
- Aim at building long-term relations.
- Focus on young people, including children, to create opportunities for the future.
Guidelines to show Insistency
Both municipal safety coordinators and voluntary groups can benefit from the building of long-term connections instead of merely assuming that the crisis situation itself will somehow automatically induce the emergence of collaborative efforts. A lesson learned from the research done for the PEP project (Johansson & Linnell 2012, Linnell et al. 2013) is that collaborative efforts are centred all too often on specific issues, and consequently restricted in terms of time. Thus a long-term perspective should preferably be taken to collaboration, which should be subject to a greater degree of formalization. As stated above, a useful way of keeping the actors connected and updated would be through the increased and well considered use of appropriate social media and other ICT tools. Several positive examples are provided in Lindquist et al. (2013). Further, it is important to involve children and young people in volunteer crisis management to ensure continuous relations between the municipality and the public.
