In carrying out Open Doors, we wanted to contribute to the health and well-being of LGBT+ youngsters, by creating an inclusive professional community trained to sensitively address LGBT+ struggles. Our project addressed the professionalization needs of the youth workers, educators and facilitators, active with or within the LGBT+ community. ISSUES AND NEEDS AT ITS ORIGIN LGBT+ youngsters are daily exposed to hate-speech, stereotypes, bullying, hate crimes, violence, harassment and discrimination in the online and social environments. We had noticed from our practice that many of them did not receive proper emotional support in their communities or simply they do not seek it. The health-care system working with LGBT+ in Europe is mainly focused on treatment instead of prevention. We wanted to carry out this project to address these issues, so we proposed a youth-worker practice upgrade with an ESS-approach (Empathy, Sensitivity, Safety) by means of coaching and positive psychology (PP) tools. ESS approach aims for prevention. ESS works via understanding (with coaching questions) and creating agency in someone by emphasizing on their strengths (with PP tools) and making them ready to face any struggles. We strongly believe in the powerful impact of coaching and Positive psychology when addressing minority groups, such as teh LGBT+. With this project, we offered youth workers tools to enrich, support and empower LGBT+ youth to achieve independently better quality of life. We aimed to train youth-workers to create a safe space for LGBT+ youth to feel seen and heard, and to support them by staying away from judging, victimizing or rescuing them. WHAT DID WE WANT TO ACHIEVE A central aim of this project was to create a context where LGBT+ professionals that work with LGBT+ youth would be connected with non-LGBT+ professionals that work in schools or organisations that have inclusive programs for LGBT+ youth. We noticed a division within the professional community, and we wanted to narrow the gap between “us” and “them”. This polarization of “us” and “them” is visible also in society between LGBT+ and non-LGBT+ individuals. Our goal was to train professionals to apply positive psychology coaching in their work: a methodology entirely focused on creating contact with the human being behind behavior, behind looks, behind lifestyle. The approach we used supports creating connection in communication with someone out of real curiosity and openness. We aimed to train professionals to offer sensitive support (using teh Empathy Sensitivity Safety -ESS -approach) to minority group members and to facilitate inclusion by applying positive psychology coaching tools. In this experiential learning community, peer-to-peer learning was made possible so that non-LGBT+ professionals could really zoom-in the LGBT-community and see what are the struggles to be different and to feel a minority, and for LGBT+ professionals to zoom out and look out of their LGBT+ box to open up in a way to become more aware of the fact that it does not matter how one lives, or loves, but what's important is that one feels understood by others and a life free of judgement (professionally and personally). PROJECT OBJECTIVES The main aim of the project (to create an inclusive professional community to address LGBT+) was broken down into the following objectives: • to train 26 youth workers on applying coaching and positive psychology tools, through an ESS(empathy, sensitivity, safety) approach in their practice with LGBT+ youth • to disseminate and spread the outcomes of the Open Doors (OD) training course (TC) in the implementation Phase 2 through 9 workshops that participants organized inside their own organisations, or in their local communities (1 per partner) • to disseminate and spread the outcomes of the TC through a booklet/magazine collecting tools and work forms to support and empower LGBT+ with the contribution of every partner and through an online open sharing platform (whatsapp group, google shared drive). • to stimulate self-reflection competences of youth workers that designed their customized professionalization and learning in the calibration meeting (Phase 3) • to ensure that evaluation of the learning would happen during the project through Youth Passes and questionnaires ( online evaluation questionnaire and wellbeing questionnaires handed in in person before and after Phase 1 and 3).