Group resilience, community support and associative behavior - lessons learned from a grant scheme program

Associative behavior is largely related to both increased group and individual resilience. Associative behavior is linked with other behavioral and emotional variables that are linked to increased personal and group resilience - togetherness, helping others, sharing hope and other positive future oriented feelings. One might consider that reciprocal positive modeling is one of the main factors that shape both individuals and groups to be resilient. The paper discusses from a qualitative point of view the resilience factors that were involved in groups that attended a small grant scheme of the "For the Community Foundation", where the authors are member of the grant-awarding jury. In depth qualitative interviews were performed with winners of the grants (two subgroups multiple winners and single winners) and were contrasted with groups that were rejected (multiple rejections, several years in a raw and single rejecters). Quantitative analysis reveals a strong increase in context-oriented resilience-related behaviors for multiple winners, but also some counterintuitive mobilization of individual resilience factors in the multiple rejection groups. There were no medium and long-term modification in the single winners or rejected groups. In the discussion part, the authors imply a link between community support and group resilience and the urgency of the development of small-grant schemes in the Romanian NGO environment from a resilience point of view.