Putting Community into Community Event: Volunteer Management in Madhyapur Thimi Bisket Jatra

Abstract

This paper aims at giving a description and an assessment of the volunteer management in the Bisket Jatra, the cultural event of Madhyapur Thimi. The recruitment, selection, supporting, training and retention processes of the volunteer have been studied in order to find how the policies of the volunteer management differ in the community-based cultural event to the modern models used in organizational world. The bases of the recruitment, selection, task divisions in the Bisket Jatra are the casts, sub-casts within the Newar community and the quarters of Thimi they belong to. This paper tries to assess how effective such community-based volunteer program can be and how successfully they help deliver the event, with the increased sense of belonging and the cultural pride among the volunteers. For this, qualitative ethnographic research has been made using snowball sampling technique. The data collected through the interviews has been analyzed using descriptive method in order to show how the whole community takes charge of different tasks and coordinates as a team in the Bisket Jatra.