The role of youth work remains invaluable in supporting young people in facing difficult times. It is particularly crucial nowadays not only in the light if 4.5 million youth (aged 15-24) across the EU being unemployed (according to EC paper on Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion), but also due to the host of many other challenges they need to deal with every day. This differs widely from country to country and from one community to another. At the same time, it is essential to understand that although the challenges may seem similar at times, the approach to addressing these needs to be tailor-made to ensure that support given is truly effective and serves the needs of young people. With these in mind, we turned our attention to coaching as a flexible, yet powerful tool enabling young people to get back on track, regardless of the issues they may face. The specialist literature describes coaching as ‘the one place where the young person becomes the expert on their own life. (…) In most cases, the young person is at the receiving end of an expert’s opinion, knowledge, diagnosis, sentence, scolding, nurturing and so on. In youth coaching, the young person becomes the creator of the journey and (...) the youth coach becomes the facilitator or co-creator’ (source: www.animascoaching.com). When designing the project we went even further, though, by employing transformational coaching as the main tool to be promoted throughout the activities. Although not very different from the traditional model, transformational coaching focuses on finding a new way of seeing oneself. It invites individual or a group being coached to explore their strengths, awaken curiosity, discover the roots of success and to envision new possibilities. We find this ‘looking-at-the-bright-side’ approach refreshing and welcoming for young people, who are much too often stuck in the negativity. With the above in mind, together with partners from all over Europe, we designed the Practitioner’s Toobox, a long-term project looking at developing competences of youth work practitioners in using transformational coaching to provide effective guidance and support to young people. To achieve that, we shall work on the implementation of the following project objectives: - Identifying present-day needs and issues affecting young people in our communities - As much as we would like to see young people as one homogeneous group, youth in the UK, Poland, Greece, Portugal or Italy differ from each other greatly due to their own distinct geographical, cultural, religious or economic backgrounds. It will be crucial, therefore, that participants understand who their target group is and how to appropriately match the support tools offered by coaching to their specific needs. Identification of these will be conducted already ahead of the course as part of the preparations to the first mobility. - Training participants in the key areas of transformational coaching and its application in the youth field - This includes: learning how to establish a coaching relationship, identify areas requiring intervention, which tools to use, etc. While discovering these, participants will practice a number of essential coaching competences e.g. active listening, effective questioning, facilitation, emotional intelligence, sustaining positive and inspirational communication, goal-setting, nurturing forward focused motivation, etc. - Gaining first-hand experience in coaching by implementing local activities back home - It is essential that from the very start participants are immersed in coaching by testing the tools/methods on themselves. This way they will be able to better understand the essence of coaching practice and will be ready for their work with young people back home. The practice period will serve as the test to their skills and understanding of the tool. To support them further regular coaching and mentoring meetings will be conducted via Skype with the trainers and fellow participants (mini 1-2-1 coaching sessions). - Exchanging best practices and useful tools in the areas of youth coaching, guidance, counselling and mentoring - Adequate space during the training course and the seminar will be given to participants to share with fellow attendees other useful tools/resources/practices. - Facilitating networking between partner promoters and the development of strategies for future joint projects focused on coaching, youth guidance and empowerment - As part of the project participants will have the chance to: get to know each other’s organisations better, learn about their activities at the local and international level, exchange best practices, case studies, share successes and failures, explore the funding possibilities of the ERASMUS+ Programme, etc. All these will help to strengthen the partnership and will hopefully inspire partner promoters to follow-up with new mobility projects, either for youth workers or young people themselves.