Despite growing numbers of young people (YP) that are involved in youth mobility projects all over Europe, there are still far too many YP who have never heard of such projects and never had the chance to get involved. We observe that YP lack self-confidence, a sense of initiative and connection to the community. For those youngsters, high quality and on their interests-oriented projects would be a very valuable “kick” in life to get more active and included, get empowered and develop themselves further. YEs should be the projects by the YP & with the YP & for the YP, but from our experience, we can confirm that in practice it is unfortunately not that often like this. There are "dinosaurs" who write projects for many years, outcompeting less experienced newcomers, while in such "dinosaur" YE projects partnerships and active involvement of YP remain “on paper” only because only a few of the partner organisations and group leaders (and even less - the YP) have a chance to be involved in the project idea development from the very beginning. From our partners observations, we know that this issue exists also in their youth work realities. We all strongly believe that youth projects and particularly YEs should be “given back” to the YP that we work with. Based on this need and motivation, we came up with the idea of the contact-making event (CME) “Laboratory for Developing Youth Exchange”. The main aim of the project was to bring together 32 "new" youth leaders, activists, peer-to-peer educators from our partner organisations that are active locally but want to gain contacts and become more active internationally by developing a YE project with and for their local YP. The CME would enable them to find like-minded people for developing the YE ideas together, making sure that they comply with the quality criteria of E+ and have a strong connection for youth participation, inclusion and learning. During the project participants developed 10 YE ideas that with the help of partner organisations could be submitted to their National Agencies. We hope that all participants will take part in future YEs as hosting/sending org. team members or group leaders. To achieve the general aim, we set forth these objectives: - Build trust among participants and let them get to know each other so that personal and professional connection serves as a basis for stable partnership in future YE projects - Share challenges of young people in their youth work realities and develop skills to identify young people's needs and interests that could serve as a basis for developing project ideas - Build understanding about the quality criteria in E+ YEs with a special focus on youth participation, inclusion and learning dimension - Support the development of concrete YE ideas that could be applied for the nearest deadlines to E+ (and next programme) - Strengthen motivation and confidence to implement the YE project ideas by allowing to realise the benefits of such project for participants themselves, YP and organisations involved as well as seeing it in a wider – European context - Create mutual support and coaching system for the successful implementation of project ideas. As for our organisations, it is more and more important to make sure that YEs are not only great meeting opportunities for YP, but they tackle and explore deeper also some topics related to real-life challenges, in order to make sure that all developed YEs are relevant and somehow touch topics that are relevant all over Europe, we made sure that all participants were aware of EU Youth Goals and EU values, so, each youth exchange should be related to one of these. To promote inclusion, we have agreed with the partners and the participants that each YE project will include also some YP with fewer opportunities. With the coaching system (from trainers) and partners and peer support, we increased the chance that the ideas, later on, are implemented and won't remain on paper only. Connection to E+ objectives: - Project invests in youth workers professional contacts & competencies to develop projects for youth - YEs - in partnership with partners from other countries, thus international cooperation capacities and general quality of youth work that our partner organizations provide will increase (which is one of the main objectives of KA1 - Mobility of youth workers) - Newly developed YE projects will provide an opportunity for many YP that haven't been involved in E+ before to be included and get valuable learning opportunities - both as individuals as well as more active members of our communities - As participants will have the chance to work on YE ideas coached by experienced trainers and they will have met and built project ideas in close partnership, this will also improve the quality of YEs they do and their awareness about EU Youth Goals and European values in projects.