Faroe Islands: Siltanews – News Desk
When the Prime Minister of the Faroe Islands announced in 2019 that he would close the country for an entire weekend to allow for the restoration of environmental damage, more than 3,000 volunteers from around the world said they wanted to help. Since then, the Faroes have repeated the success every year. 15,000 applied for this year’s 80 spaces.
Every year, Visit Faroe Islands receives thousands of applications from people around the world who want to volunteer during the annual Closed for Maintenance program.
It is a kind of community clean-up and maintenance day across the Faroe Islands, but only 80 chosen people from around the world are allowed to participate.
This year, nine projects had been selected for the volunteers to get busy with. Closed for Maintenance is run by local tourist offices, municipalities and Visit Faroe Islands.
In addition to the 80 selected foreigners who have all paid for their journey to the Faroes, 40 locals are also part of the big maintenance weekend across the 18 islands in the North Atlantic.
To understand how it all works, we go back to February 2019. “The Faroe Islands are closed for maintenance” read the Visit Faroe Islands’ website on 20 February 2019.
The message was backed up by a video where Prime Minister, Aksel V. Johannesen, made it clear that the Faroe Islands would remain closed for two months for maintenance, but open for volunteers who wanted to come and help out with the work.
This created a lot of attention and headlines. CNN, New York Times, Der Spiegel, Forbes, the Guardian and many other major international media all covered this somewhat unusual initiative – which turned out to be a stunt, an ad that was paid for by Visit Faroe Islands.
As campaigns go, Closed for Maintenance was an unparalleled success. More than 500 stories about the project were published, and read by nearly four million people. The World Economic Forum listed the project as one of the five best initiatives for the planet in 2019.
The Faroese themselves have also joined the project, for various reasons. We will come back to that.
The project’s practical impact for tourists in the mountainous country became very visible last year when a group of volunteers were working on the path up to Skálhøvdi, a small mountain on the island of Sandoy.
One of their jobs was to place posts along the path for people to navigate by when trekking up the mountain.
Journalist Tórður Mikkelsen from Kringvarp Føroya, the public broadcaster, followed the volunteers’ work. He said that while they took a break, two tourists approached – following the same posts that the volunteers had just put down.
He filmed the entire episode, and posted it on Facebook where he jokingly concluded that there was an immediate payoff for the group’s work: The tourists actually overtook the volunteers who were maintaining and improving the trail for them.