Service Civil International (SCI) uses volunteering and non-formal education in its approach to creating a culture of peace, when organising volunteering and educational opportunities for youth. The international network organises volunteering services/camps (long- and shortterm) in more than 90 countries world wide. It also organises numerous seminars and trainings every year to improve the work we are doing, in which we exchange between branches of SCI and other organisations. “Be your country!?” was a chance to reflect on the work and we and other partners do in our daily youth work in which we aim to create mutual understanding and raise the awareness of Europe and European citizenship. In youth and volunteering projects, we gather international groups of young people to foster mutual understanding and a culture of peace. However, we often do this from a point of observing and emphasizing the national and cultural differences between participants rather than the similarities. We ask participants to bring „food from their country“ for an „international evening“, we support volunteers in their „cultural shock“ when they go for a long-term voluntary service to another country and we talk about our work as „intercultural learning“. In this seminar, youth workers and staff from volunteering organisations around Europe took a closer look at what we do, when we culturalize our non-formal education programs, our energizers, our support and training structures and our free time activities. This reflection often also applied to the work done in local youth centers, where energizers also use stereotypes and young people with different “cultural backgrounds” can be ascribed roles because of their background. SCI and its partners in this project have over the last years played actively with creating activities and approaches that avoid exactly this reproduction of stereotypes in jokes, games, educational activities and conversations between the participants. Through the seminar we aimed to exchange and create a set of alternative approaches that instead of emphasising the differences put the spot light on what makes us all European and human. The objectives were: Reflect on the term “culture” and its relations to other terms such as country, ethnicity etc. Understand the intersectional identity of individuals that go beyond national or “cultural” identity and include others like gender, class, education, age etc. Take a closer look at the term “culture” in intercultural learning, and how this can include looking at subcultures as well Reflect on European values that connect us and the “culture of peace and non-violence” that SCI proposes Create an approach to the get-to-know phase in international youth exchanges that uses “cultural” references at a minimal level if at all Reflect on methods such as intercultural evenings and similar in their effects on young people and their perception of culture and Europe Develop NFE methods to address “culture” in youth exchanges and other youth work settings in an alternative way Network Promote Erasmus+, NFE and international youth work Create guidelines for other youth workers Present the results of our discussions in a public presentation for youth workers and other stakeholders Promote a European identity and awareness amongst youth