June 30, EU-PROMENS and NWA conducted the final evaluation workshop for the Danish activities covering a total of 3 Core Trainings and 4 Advanced Training sessions with more than 140 participants in total.

The full recording can be found as a Microsoft Sharepoint Event recording here – or find an executive summary below.

When Her Excellency the Honourable Carolyn Bennett looks at a problem, she does not see a solitary symptom, an isolated voter, or a single border. She sees a root system.

Currently serving as the Canadian Ambassador to Denmark, Bennett’s career is a masterclass in breaking down silos. Before entering diplomacy, she spent over two decades as a family physician, delivered thousands of babies, and served as a Member of Parliament for 26 years—including tenures as Canada’s first Minister of State for Public Health and Minister of Mental Health and Addictions. Whether navigating the chaotic aftermath of the 2003 SARS outbreak, indigenous rights or managing modern international relations, Bennett’s philosophy has remained remarkably consistent: real solutions are found bottom-up, built by the people who live and work in the trenches.

The Flower Shop Philosophy: A Lesson in Intersectionality

Long before the concept of intersectionality became a buzzword in academic circles, Bennett was learning its core mechanics in her family’s flower shop.

“I grew up in a flower shop,” she recalls, explaining how the business relied on a tightly coordinated ecosystem of diverse talents. The designers who styled the arrangements were not always the best at dealing with customers, while the delivery drivers held localized, practical knowledge that couldn’t be taught from behind a desk. “A designer would occasionally go out to the delivery room and try and tell somebody in what order to deliver the parcels,” Bennett says, “and you go, ‘No, they actually know where there’ll be traffic. It’s better to go this way than that way'”.

This upbringing taught her a foundational rule that she carried straight into medicine, politics, and diplomacy: “Know what you know, know what you don’t know, and know who and when to go for help“. As a family doctor, she actively rejected the “super-specialization” that ignored the bigger picture. Instead, she championed the role of the generalist—the person who respects all players and understands how different sectors interact, whether it is medical disciplines collaborating or looking at how nature, housing, and poverty dictate human wellness.

Respect and Trust are the pillars of successful collaboration

To build a truly interdisciplinary system, Bennett argues that you must strip away institutional arrogance and replace it with two core ingredients: respect and trust.

In medicine, this meant moving away from rigid “scopes of practice” that barred capable professionals from contributing, shifting instead toward “core competencies” and mutual trust. Bennett highlights this through the concept of “delegated acts” within her own past medical practice, relying on a deeply experienced registered nursing assistant.

“It is about the ability to observe her a number of times until she feels confident… ‘See one, do one, teach one,'” Bennett notes. This model required absolute trust and accountability: “Knowing that in a delegated act, if she makes a mistake, it’s my mistake… This was a mutual decision, and it’s still my responsibility”. For Bennett, true collaboration requires creating a safe space where professionals—and patients—are treated as true partners, stripping away self-interest to form a cohesive team.

Telemedicine and the Burning Platform of COVID-19

Too often, bureaucratic inertia blocks progress until a crisis forces a paradigm shift. Bennett calls this a “burning platform”. For the healthcare sector, that platform was the COVID-19 pandemic.

For over fifteen years, advocates had pushed for virtual care options, particularly for young people or individuals who frequently missed appointments due to logistical barriers. Yet, administrative and financial systems resisted. When COVID-19 arrived, the impossible suddenly became a daily reality. E-prescribing and virtual appointments flourished because they had to.

This sudden evolution cracked open new pathways for equity, proving that a flexible approach works. When it comes to adopting team-based care or new technological integrations, Bennett’s advice to hesitant establishments is simple and pragmatic: “Try it, you’ll like it”.

Bridging Distances: From Canada to Greenland and Denmark

Now, as Canada’s Ambassador to Denmark, Bennett sees how these lessons bridge the massive geographic and cultural distances separating the North American Arctic and Scandinavia.

Canada and the Kingdom of Denmark (through its deep relationships with Greenland and the Faroe Islands) share the immense challenge of providing equitable care across vast, isolated expanses. Telemedicine and e-health have transitioned from modern conveniences to absolute lifelines for northern, remote indigenous communities.

Furthermore, Bennett emphasizes that Western frameworks are profoundly incomplete without Indigenous knowledge. Whether collaborating through the Arctic Council or conducting research in Cambridge Bay, true progress requires integrating local expertise. Just as Canadian healthcare is striving to embrace First Nations’ holistic “medicine wheel”—addressing the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual quadrants of wellness—modern diplomacy must acknowledge that communities understand their own environments best.

Trusting the Experts of Lived Experience

Ultimately, Carolyn Bennett’s journey from a family doctor clinic to an embassy is united by a singular, democratic truth: the people affected by a system are the ones who know it best.

In medicine, the patient is the ultimate expert on their own body and life, while the doctor is merely an expert on the available tools and tests. The exact same logic applies to a healthy democracy. Citizens are the experts on what is working and failing in their neighborhoods; the politician’s job is simply to understand the levers of the system well enough to implement the changes those citizens actually need.

By flattening hierarchies and treating both patients and citizens as essential partners, Ambassador Bennett continues to prove that whether you are delivering a baby, drafting public health legislation, or reinforcing Arctic alliances, you must always look the people in the eye, listen to their stories, and trust their expertise.

Staying human under pressure – a meaningful challenge and growth for a Greek volunteer firefighter

There is a moment Eleanna Malliou returns to when asked about mental resilience. She is in a fire truck moving through a crowd of families who have been told to leave their homes. A wildfire is burning somewhere above them in the mountain. The people standing on either side of the road don’t know yet whether their houses will be there when it ends.

“When we passed through, I saw the kids, the families – you could see very anxious people, people who looked more relaxed but you knew inside they were not,” she says. “There are people who don’t know if in two hours their home will still be there. And I’m going to help them – but that sank my heart.”

What she describes is not quite fear and not quite sadness. It is something more precise: the emotional weight of being the person driving toward the thing everyone else is running from, while being close enough to feel exactly what that costs them. “I felt nice that I was helping,” she says. “But I felt bad because of the feelings they would be experiencing at that point.”

This double sensation – the pull of purpose against the weight of what you witness – is perhaps the most honest description of what mental resilience actually feels like from the inside. Not toughness. Not detachment. A bridge, as she puts it, between helping and feeling bad.

Eleanna Malliou (front row, second from right) is a volunteer firefighter and member of OEDD: the Volunteer Forest Firefighters and Rescuers of Ekali, a community-based team founded in 2000 in the Ekali suburb north of Athens, currently participating in the MentaStress project.

Personality, preparation, and knowing your gaps

Eleanna is candid that resilience is not the same for everyone. It starts with personality. “Someone who is really sensitive would get more impacted by going to incidents with bad things happening,” she says. She counts herself among the sensitive ones – and then describes, without any contradiction, how she has managed to function effectively anyway.

Her answer is preparation. “What always helps me feel that I’ll react more okay is getting as much knowledge as I can – so when I get there, I know how to help.” The logic is straightforward: anxiety is sharpest when you don’t know what to do. Training doesn’t eliminate the emotional charge of an incident; it keeps the not-knowing from overwhelming you on top of it. “Of course, I’m touched by the fact that someone got hurt – but I also get a nice feeling, because I go help them. I take some of the bad thoughts out and I’m like: I was there, I helped, I did everything I could.”

She is also honest about limits. “I have no idea how I’m going to react if I eventually go to a person who has passed. No one knows how they will react until they face it.” What she has instead of certainty is a team. She describes knowing that colleagues with more experience can cover her gaps – and knowing that if she needs to, she can step back to the truck, sit down, and give herself time to come back to herself. 

A culture still learning to talk mental health

As an organisation, OEDD was born some 25 years ago. Debriefing – the vital, structured conversation after an incident – actually came later. So for the early years of the team’s existence, it simply wasn’t there. Is it not a given in any culture.

And when Eleanna is asked what single practice she would recommend to any volunteer fire team that didn’t yet have it, she doesn’t hesitate: “Debriefing. I know I’ve been repeating myself, but I feel it’s a really important step.” The reason she gives is precise: “You may think you did something wrong when you eventually didn’t. Or you heard the story from only your perspective. If you don’t hear it from everyone, your thoughts just go around.”

She recalls a group of colleagues who came back from a wildfire that turned on them – the kind where the fire reverses direction without warning. “They had a huge debrief. It was three hours long, which is a long one.” They all came out better. She saw it with her own eyes.

“It’s still kind of a taboo thing. Some people, it’s their ego going in front. But we always know that if we need to talk to someone, there’s someone there – without judging us.”

Mental health in firefighting, she acknowledges, remains largely a taboo. Direct conversations 

about psychological strain are still rare. What her team does have is something quieter: the knowledge that if you need to talk to someone, someone will be there, without judgement. She hopes the MentaStress project shifts this further – while being realistic that not everyone will put their ego down. Some, she thinks, will engage with the material quietly and alone, at home, when no one is watching.

Breathing through it: the 5-3-2-1 method

Among the tools the MentaStress project has introduced to her team, two stand out for Eleanna: a breathing exercise and the 5-3-2-1 grounding method. Both matter, she says, because they are doable – practical enough to use in real conditions, including sitting in a fire truck on the way back from a wildfire. “Having a few exercises in your head – breathe in, breathe out, relax – maybe after a very intense thing, you can sit in the truck while moving back and calm yourself down.” 

The 5-3-2-1 method – a grounding tool that uses the five senses to anchor attention back to the present moment – proved its value beyond the fire station when Eleanna’s flatmate, who struggled with anxiety, turned out to already be using it. “She said the 5-3-2-1 method, I use it a lot to calm myself down. That’s when I realised – these are not only things to keep in the fire station. You may find yourself in a very stressful situation anywhere. It’s good to know how to bring yourself back to normal.”

A message to young Europeans

Eleanna is one of the younger firefighters in her team, and one of relatively few women. When asked what she would say to other young Europeans considering volunteer firefighting, she doesn’t reach for recruitment language. She reaches for something more honest.

“It for sure gives you personal growth. You grow up faster. You see the world more.” There is knowledge you gain that you would never have thought you needed, and that turns out to be useful in ways you couldn’t have predicted. Being part of an emergency response team changes how you move through ordinary life: she no longer drinks and drives. Not as a rule someone imposed on her, but because she has seen what happens when people do, and there is simply no “fine” in it anymore.

Her call to action is not dramatic; “If you find it at least a tiny bit interesting, go try it. You don’t lose anything. When the wrong moment comes, you will be more ready to face it than people who have no idea about fire safety.”

She pauses, then adds the other part: helping people feels good. When she goes to an incident and does everything she can, even when the outcome isn’t what she hoped, she carries something back: I was there. I helped. That, in the end, is also what resilience is built from.

What Firefighters and Medicine Teach Us About Mental Resilience

In 1949, fifteen elite smokejumpers leaped into the Montana wilderness to confront what appeared to be a routine forest fire. Within hours, thirteen of them were dead. The Mann Gulch disaster has since become the definitive case study for how high-performing teams collapse under extreme pressure. It was not a lack of fitness or training that killed these men; it was a breakdown in sensemaking. When their commander, Wag Dodge, realized the fire had turned and ordered his men to drop their heavy tools and lie down in a patch of grass he had intentionally set ablaze – an “escape fire” – the team failed to recognise his genius. Tethered to their training and unable to make sense of an unprecedented command, they ran uphill, tools in hand, and were overtaken by the flames.

Today, Dr. Paul Barach – a physician, former military officer, and global expert in patient safety – uses the haunting legacy of Mann Gulch to challenge our modern understanding of mental resilience. With a career spanning emergency medicine, anesthesiology and health systems reform across four continents, Barach argues that the “heroic-individual” model of medicine and emergency response is not only outdated but dangerous.

Nordic Wellbeing Academy had the pleasure to chat with Barach in relation to the MentaStress project. 

Microsystems – not individuals

Barach’s central argument is blunt: resilience has very little to do with the individual if the team doesn’t support them. “The unit of performance is not the individual. The unit of performance is the clinical microsystem.”

This insight came from five years in the military, where everything he had learned in medical school was challenged. He was trained in martial arts not for violence, but to learn that even after taking a punch, you continue to do what you have to do. He went on solo navigations for dozens of miles in uncertain terrain to practise being comfortable with not knowing. Working alongside special performance teams, he concluded that the heroic-individual model that medical training had given him was simply the wrong and unsustainable model.

“Resilience has very little to do with the individual if there’s no team that supports you.”

For volunteer emergency organisations, this reframing is fundamental. A volunteer fire crew, a civil protection unit, a search and rescue team – none of these can function as a collection of individually resilient people. The resilience either lives in the team or it doesn’t exist.

Sensemaking – a skill few teach

Karl Weick, an organisational theorist, analyses the Mann Gulch disaster in 1993. According to him, the 13 smoke jumpers lacked sensemaking: the capacity to construct enough understanding of an unfolding situation to take the next step. The question Barach puts to trainees is not “what is happening?” but “do I have enough to move to the next point of uncertainty?” Waiting for certainty before acting is not caution; in dynamic environments, it is paralysis.

“He used it as a metaphor for organism – for how to survive by changing the environment around you, not just responding to it.”

The Mann Gulch commander’s escape fire was an act of applied sensemaking under extreme pressure: he changed the terms of the problem rather than trying to solve the original problem with insufficient resources. The lesson for volunteer organisations is not to train only for expected scenarios, but to always train for the routine moments when the scenario stops making sense.

Uncertainty is a resource, not a threat

A great and initially counterintuitive point from Barach is that certainty is more dangerous than uncertainty. “Certainty is very comforting, but it’s a great danger: it offers an artificial construct of security.” When practitioners feel certain, they stop scanning. They stop adapting. They stop being afraid. They miss the signals that the situation has changed.

For volunteer emergency organisations, this has direct training implications. Programmes focused exclusively on correct procedures for expected scenarios may be producing practitioners who are capable in familiar situations and brittle in unfamiliar ones. What Barach advocates for is explicit training in the unexpected – through simulation, role-playing and scenario variation – so that not knowing what to do next becomes itself a practised, navigable state.

“Mike Tyson says everybody has a plan until they’re punched in the face. Resilience is agility – a willingness to accept that there are multiple ways to reach your solution.”

Learning by design, not by chance

Barach has spent more than two decades designing structured learning moments for clinical and emergency settings. His conviction is simple: “I don’t believe in learning by chance. Learning happens when there is an explicit effort to codify the lesson, reflect on what it meant, and extract from it what’s meaningful for future encounters.”

Structured debriefing is central – but not as mere incident review. What Barach is after is what he calls “good emotional residue”: a debrief that leaves practitioners with a sense of having been seen and supported in processing what happened. This includes self-forgiveness. The “second victim” phenomenon – the responder traumatised by their own involvement in an adverse event – is real, lasting, and systematically under-addressed, leading to much burnout, broken spirited healthcare providers and turnover in emergency services. For organisations operating with limited time and resources, his advice is to start small and make it structural: even a brief, well-designed check-in after each significant call, led by a leader who models vulnerability, begins to build the reflective culture that complex emergency work requires. He advises: “Lean into near misses and near failures as they offer deep knowledge about system complexity.”

The Lesson That Took Thirty Years

Between the Mann Gulch disaster and Weick’s analysis over 40 years passed. The escape fire technique is now standard worldwide enabled by years of institutional learning. Barach finds this story both hopeful (because learning does happen) and troubling (because the pace may not be adequate for the complexity of the crises we face). However, he highlights that the pace can be accelerated through explicit, structurally embedded and deep learning processes, not through hope nor individual heroism. 

“These things are shaped,” he says. “You have to shape them deliberately.” That, perhaps, is the deepest lesson from Mann Gulch: Dodge, the commander’s escape fire was genius in the moment. The work of resilience is turning individual genius into collective knowledge – before the next fire arrives.

Further Reading

Karl Weick (1996)  “Prepare Your Organization to Fight Fires” – Harvard Business Review.

Norman Maclean (1992)  Young Men and Fire – The definitive account of the Man Gulch disaster.

U.S. Fire Administration  Man Gulch analysis and policy lessons – how the disaster became standard procedure.

Firefighter Nation  “Sensemaking and Its Effect on Firefighter and Fire Officer Decisions.”

Weick (1993)  “The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster” – JSTOR.

Barach P, Phelps G. Clinical sensemaking: a systematic approach to reduce the impact of normalised deviance in the medical profession. J R Soc Med. 2013 Oct;106(10):387-90. doi: 10.1177/0141076813505045. PMID: 24097963; PMCID: PMC3791099.

Mohr JJ, Barach P, Cravero JP, Blike GT, Godfrey MM, Batalden PB, Nelson EC. Microsystems in health care: Part 6. Designing patient safety into the microsystem. Jt Comm J Qual Saf. 2003 Aug;29(8):401-8. doi: 10.1016/s1549-3741(03)29048-1. PMID: 12953604.

As part of our work in the EU Social Innovation+ Initiative project ISRICM, the Nordic Wellbeing Academy and its European partners are happy to release recording of the fourth webinar in our series from April 8 on social inclusion.

The webinar features the key experts Cristina Carnovale – Kogui Hub, Dr. Yvonne Prinzellner – USTP, and Nina Sønderberg – Nordic Wellbeing Academy.

– Afaf Kabbani on why she is joining the EU-PROMENS Training Programme in Denmark

With 17 years of experience as a midwife and an upcoming master’s degree in social psychology, Afaf Kabbani is no stranger to standing at the intersection of professions, sectors, and human lives. Yet – perhaps precisely because of this – she knows that experience with interdisciplinary work is not the same as truly understanding it.

“You can work in interdisciplinary settings for years without having an actual interdisciplinary perspective, or the tools needed to create real synergy,” she says. That insight is what has drawn her towards the EU-PROMENS training courses in Denmark –  an initiative that places interdisciplinarity within mental health at its very core.

Afaf is deeply engaged with people in transitions: the chosen, the forced, the natural, and those arriving from the outside — such as the digital transformations that shape everyday life at increasing speed. Many people find these challenging. Some face a double challenge, carrying multiple vulnerabilities at once. And it is here, she believes, that interdisciplinarity is not merely an advantage – it is a necessity.

“When we talk about children’s mental health in schools, five or six different professional groups are quickly in play. We are all looking at our part of the elephant – with an equal share of truth, and an equal need for each other’s knowledge to complete the picture.”

But interdisciplinarity demands more than shared meeting rooms. It requires awareness, intention, and structure. “It is not just about putting people in the same room – it is about meaning and direction,” Afaf emphasises. Without these, interdisciplinarity can become resistance rather than synergy.

The international dimension of EU-PROMENS holds particular appeal for her. The project brings together expertise and experience across countries, cultures, and professional tradition – and that, Afaf believes, is precisely what the field needs. “Diversity of the many people contributing with a great deal –that creates a critical mass.”

Nordic Wellbeing Academy looks forward to welcoming Afaf as a participant, and is glad that EU-PROMENS can offer a space where curiosity about other perspectives is not merely welcomed – it is the very point.

Press release – March 20th, 2026
New webinar announced – In our series of webinars as part of the ISRICM project, we are happy to announce the closing edition on social inclusion taking place April 8th, 15 CET.

Connecting social inclusion activist Cristina Carnovale, Diversity Researcher Dr Yvonne Prinzellner, and NWA’s National Director Nina Sønderberg – a practitioner, a researcher, and a bridge-builder – our own International Director Lars Münter will facilitate the conversation as we explore how social inclusion takes shape in real organisations: what it demands of structures, cultures, and the people within them, and what emerging trends are reshaping the landscape for young professionals and media role models.

“Social inclusion is not a policy checkbox – it is a living practice,” says Lars Münter on behalf of NWA. “What we are seeing in our ISRICM work across Europe is that organisations are genuinely willing to commit to inclusion, but they struggle to make it concrete at speed. This session is about exactly that: translating values into action, and understanding what the next generation of professionals and role models actually needs from the systems around them.”

The webinar will also share insights from our recent training sessions in Copenhagen, where participants worked hands-on with the practical architecture of inclusion – and what it takes to embed it in an organisation not as a programme, but as a way of working.

You can sign up via Eventbrite here.

NWA are happy to announce that we will be supporting the European mental health programme EU-PROMENS in Denmark.

Across Denmark, we will conduct a total series of 6 training sessions (3 Core, 3 Advanced) and two webinars – read more about these and sign up here. Join to expand your knowledge, your network, and and your professional profile.

EU-PROMENS is a capacity-building programme on mental health financed by the EU4Health programme and will be implemented by the project consortium (GFA Consulting Group GmbH, Trimbos Institute, and Mental Health Europe) between January 2024 and December 2026. It enhances and improves the capacity of health professionals across Europe in the field of mental health. Read more about the programme (and maybe join elsewhere in Europe) via their website here.

NWA Nina Sønderberg and Lars Münter in February participated in the EU-PROMENS Exchange Programme in Barcelona and got a thorough introduction to local practices for collaboration and knowledge sharing. These insights and experiences is part of the EU-PROMENS ambition and goal – to inspire people to build stronger mental health services, interventions, and practices across sectors and borders.

As part of our work in the EU Social Innovation+ Initiative project ISRICM, the Nordic Wellbeing Academy and its European partners are happy to release recording of the third webinar in our series from March 4 on leadership.

The webinar features the key experts Julia Persson – Scita Health and Nordic Charter for Women’s Health 2040 , Roit Feldenkreis – Conductor Director of Leadership Excellence Program Lotem, and Lars Münter – Nordic Wellbeing Academy.

In late January, NWA joined partners from Denmark, Greece, and Italy on the island of Syros for the Forgotten Fish project’s second implementation meeting – two days that brought together chefs, fishermen, cultural organisations, local authorities, and educators around a shared question: what would it take for the fish we have stopped cooking to return to our tables?

The meeting was hosted by the Lazareta Cultural Association in Hermoupolis, the beautifully preserved neoclassical port capital of Syros. It was a fitting location. The Cyclades, with their rich Mediterranean marine biodiversity and their tradition of simple, resourceful coastal cooking, offer exactly the kind of living laboratory that the Forgotten Fish project needs.

The programme moved fluidly between the strategic and the sensory. Partners coordinated project progress across the three countries, watched video presentations from each partner community, and sat down to lunch with local fishermen over dishes prepared from species that rarely see a restaurant plate. Chef Dimitris Plitas led a demonstration with the Syros Gastronomy Association in the afternoon, showing how forgotten species can be transformed into dishes that meet the highest contemporary standards without losing their connection to place and tradition. The second day brought a visit to the fish market in Hermoupolis, a meeting with the Municipality of Syros, traditional sweet-making demonstrations, and an evening cooking session at Peritinos Restaurant.

For NWA, Syros was a vivid reminder of why the transnational dimension of this project matters. The knowledge flows in all directions: Greek culinary heritage informing Danish kitchen practice, Danish policy analysis supporting Greek and Italian advocacy, Italian survey depth grounding shared recommendations. The best arguments for sustainable food, it turns out, are still made through flavour.

The Forgotten Fish project is an Erasmus+ KA210-VET Small-Scale Partnership (2024-1-DK01-KA210-VET-000253675), co-funded by the European Union.