“Helping Hands for Europe” was a project to help youngsters aged15 and 20 years old to organize their own social projects and share experiences and know-how. It also aimed to empower them with the skills and networks to foster youth action at local and international level. In the preparatory phase and preparing this project, we identified the following topics as the main ones for our exchange: 1. Improving social competences and learning from others by teamwork, learning about multicultural experiences, 2. Improving our personal skills, such as character development, resilience, commitment to projects, empathy, etc. 3. Train our multilingual competences, especially for the groups from Finland, Hungary and Sweden having the opportunity to practice English outside school with native speakers is a great plus. For the teams from Ireland and England this doesn't apply that directly, but working on multicultural teams and learn about other European countries is important. 4. Increase our cultural awareness, learn about European culture and history and befriend people from various countries. Engage with people from different backgrounds and explore new natural and urban sites. 5. Learn to prepare our own projects and inspire friends to get involved in volunteering and solidarity and get new friends and ideas for concrete actions that we could take in order to build a better society. 6. Further our understanding and ability to assist those below the poverty line and those who are socially disadvantaged. 7. To learn to respect other cultures and other people. Since that is extremely important in democracy and especially in our modern society. Our objective is to organize various solidarity events by groups, each one with participants from different countries. The solidarity activities take place before the exchange locally, and during it, they are the bases for the morning activities as well as for the workshops where participants will share experiences, know-how and ideas. The follow-up phase is focused on spreading ideas from the project and preparing future cooperation projects between the participants. The main activities involved in this project were: 1. At the local phase, each team organized their own social projects. This included sharing food with people with economic obstacles, visiting elderly houses, helping homeless people, ecovolunteering, workshops for young people, support for Ukrain, workshops on integration, respect and inclusion and many other activities leaded by the participants. This phase was longer than planned, due to the Pandemic, covering most of 2020, 2021 and Spring of 2022. 2. In May 2022 one leader and one participant from each country traveled to Finland to have an Advanced Planning Visit and set the final structure of the Youth Exchange. 4. In July 2022 all met for the Youth Exchange in Budapest. The daily programme focused on solidarity mornings and trainings in the evenings. The solidarity mornings consisted in helping in an orphanage for kids with disabilities and painting houses of the Down Syndrome Association. In the evening the workshops included presentations about our countries and activities, exchange of experiences, group dynamics etc. 6. The main skills covered within the exchange were a) "teamwork", b) "self-master", c) "empathy and friendship", d)"good judgment and prudence" and e) "fairness". "Helping Hands for Europe" was related to 3 of the main objectives of the Erasmus+ programme: a) fostering strategic cooperation between European youth, b) the goals of the framework for European cooperation in the youth field, and c) the promotion of European values as they are stated in the Article 2 of the Treaty on the European Union. Namely, the project focused on human dignity, equality and inclusion of minorities; pluralism, respect and tolerance; and social justice. These topics were explored within the framework of volunteering activities organized by the participants. To deepen in these values, on top of the solidarity activities, we had presentations, role games, quizzes, mentoring meetings and other activities related to social entrepreneurship, self-empowerment, multicultural awareness and learning to learn. Each of the local teams prepared these activities locally during the local phase of the project with their own solidarity projects. After the exchange, we had a follow-up phase (August-October, 2022) to help each participant reflect on the learned skills and experiences, as well as to disseminate what we learned.