"An urge to take action": Motivational pathways of crisis-activated social entrepreneurs

This study examines the motivations underlying the rapid emergence of social entrepreneurship in Israel following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack and the ensuing war. While formal emergency services and volunteer organizations played important roles, many immediate responses were led by civilians who independently created new ventures to address urgent unmet needs. The study explored how these grassroots actors led community-based initiatives amid national trauma and institutional gaps. Drawing on interviews with social entrepreneurs, reflexive thematic analysis identified a dynamic interplay between contextual pressures and internal value-based and emotional drivers. Extrinsic pressures, including humanitarian urgency and failures in state response, pushed civilians into action. Intrinsic motives, including prosocial motivation, emotional proximity, meaning-making, and self-restoration, sustained engagement. For many, helping also served as a form of coping, transforming trauma into agency and grief into purpose. These findings indicate that civic leadership emerged out of the convergence of external urgency and internal purpose to drive entrepreneurial action. We conceptualize these actions as crisis-activated social entrepreneurship-a form of civic leadership that emerges from acute necessity rather than long-term planning. This type of social entrepreneurship not only contributed to the collective but also served as a mechanism of personal resilience and psychological recovery. Policy implications highlight the need to better integrate grassroots initiatives into formal crisis-response systems through coordination, targeted support, and institutional recognition. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).