The Swedish crisis management system relies strongly on collaboration. Collaboration is even declared within official documents as an obligation when preparing for and acting upon a crisis event. Collaborating can bring powerful positive effects on crisis response efforts such as an increased workforce, sharing of resources and dissemination of risks. But collaboration is hard and depends on the existence of a series of components to be effective. One such component is the presence of trust between collaborative partners.

Due to what appears to be a growing intensity in volunteer engagements within the Swedish crisis response system, issues of professional-volunteer collaboration become increasingly interesting. Volunteer adds a variety of benefits to a crisis operation, but also brings certain difficulties into the collaboration.

This paper has used semi-structured interviews in order to explored determinants of trust building between professionals and volunteers organized in the FRG format. By using a qualitative content analysis approach and incorporating identified themes into a novel tentative theoretical model, it is shown that operative trust between professionals and volunteers are highly dependent on simulation exercises as well as personal and cultural familiarity.