How do you turn holiday guests into first responders?

How can civil society step in when the ambulance can't reach you?

Many of Denmark’s smaller islands have no permanent access to mainland emergency services - and when they do, help can sometimes take a long time to arrive. When accidents happen, responsibility falls on whatever local preparedness exists, and on the island’s own residents. That is a major responsibility, and a factor that prospective residents may weigh when deciding whether an island feels like a safe place to live.

Ageing populations and depopulation on the islands, combined with a growing number of summer visitors, are widening the gap between actual safety and the feeling of safety in these remote places. The idea of turning this into something more organised didn’t start in a boardroom – it started long before and took shape in 2020 on Anholt itself, where the local emergency service already began asking visitors; visiting doctors, nurses and firefighters to lend a hand during their holidays as a part of the initiative “Gæsteberedskabet” (The Guest Emergency Service).  

TrygFonden and Beredskabsforbundet saw this good initiative and wanted to understand whether that instinct, civic responsibility paired with volunteer competencies within health, safety and emergency response, could be organised into something more structured and to a larger scale in Denmark, when a crisis hits, and hired IS IT A BIRD to carry out a cultural pre-study, with insights that guide the future solution.

“I was in my summer house for my usual summer holiday. One night, I heard the ambulance drive down my road with the sirens on, so I quickly jumped on my bike and rode after it to see if they could use my help as a doctor. I didn’t think much about it. It was just instinct, because I know there is only one doctor on the island.”

— Volunteer emergency responder, Anholt

Before building a digital solution, they wanted to understand what makes people step in for each other on an island and just as importantly, what makes them hesitate to do so. They wanted to unfold which local structures and cultures were already at play, and how a new digital solution for mobilising help more systematically could work alongside it without overruling existing strong local initiatives and well-functioning systems already present on the islands.

We didn't start with the app. We started with the people and the island.

We took an ethnographic approach to a question that is, at its core, about community, trust and responsibility. Anholt, with around 130 permanent residents (Danmarks Statistik 2026) and Denmark’s only permanent fire ban, offered a condensed, high-stakes version of island life to study.

"Anthropological insight is built by sharing time and space with the people you want to understand, staying open to the unexpected, and allowing new questions to shape the analysis as it unfolds."

— Tine Tjørnhøj-Thomsen, anthropologist, paraphrased from Ind i verden, 2003

We found out that on Anholt, relationships come before institutions. People go by first names, and formal and informal roles often blur without anyone needing to formalise them. We combined semi-structured interviews with islanders and summer house guests, participant observation on the island and vox-pop conversations on the ferry with interviews across established local, volunteer and mainland emergency service professionals.

A workshop later on with key mainland stakeholders helped translate the island perspective into something the emergency response system could use, both to develop a strong and sustainable collaboration between emergency actors and to inform an app capable of mobilising civil society.

Our analysis stood on top of the foundation already laid by a framework we at IS IT A BIRD developed together with TrygFonden in 2023 to understand what enables or prevents people from stepping in to help. The framework gave the analysis a shared language and helped turn island-specific stories into insights that could travel to other islands too.

Bridging two types of logics

In our analysis we drew on two types of social logics described in 1887 by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies: Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. Gemeinschaft describes communities held together by personal relationships, mutual obligation and shared tradition, the kind of social fabric often found in small, rural settings. Gesellschaft describes societies organised around more impersonal, contractual relationships and formal institutions, more typical of modern, urban life.

“Well, I know them (the established emergency crew) so when I come to help, it’s pretty straightforward. I know the structure well, and I know them, since I’ve lived on Anholt my whole life.”

— Volunteer emergency responder, Anholt

Island life and local emergency response on Anholt, and most other small Danish islands, largely runs on Gemeinschaft logic. The mainland emergency system largely runs on Gesellschaft logic. A digital guest preparedness solution is, by nature, a Gesellschaft structure: standardised and systemic. But to work, it needs to activate very Gemeinschaft qualities: cohesion, social bonds and a sense of shared responsibility. That is the bridge the digital solution needed to build in practice.

A set of principles for activating civil society in times of crisis through a digital solution

The pre-study translated into a qualified decision basis: an insight report with recommendations and principles for how a digital solution could support both preparedness and a sense of safety on Danish islands, without stepping on the toes of the emergency services already in place.

TrygFonden and Beredskabsforbundet now launched Trygge Øer, the app that lets the emergency dispatch centre activate volunteers with relevant health and safety competencies, such as nurses, doctors, midwives, paramedics and firefighters, when they are present on the islands and more hands are needed. Participation is voluntary and unpaid, and volunteers decide for themselves whether they are available and can always decline a task. The solution was tested on Anholt in the summer of 2026, in close collaboration with the Prehospital services in the Central Denmark Region and the East Jutland Fire Department, and with broad support from municipalities, island communities and other emergency actors.

Our anthropological work gave a deep understanding of real people behind the solutions, of the barriers and opportunities that are at stake when Danes step in and help out in situations of crisis on small islands. It also provided fundamental knowledge about island life and the emergency- and civil defence ecosystem in Denmark. We're proud to have contributed a small piece to something that TrygFonden and Beredskabsforbundet are now taking further, all over Denmark in the coming years.