The partners of this project shared the same values and ideals about youth exchanges: that they should be created and implemented BY young people FOR young people. Each of us in our own work on the local level are consistently practicing positive youth development: an approach to working with youth that emphasizes building on youths' strengths and providing supports and opportunities that will help them achieve goals and transition to adulthood in a productive, healthy manner. Therefore, less of seeing youth as beneficiaries of our projects, but more as co-creators and leaders of our programs. Sharing these principles, we decided to support and mentor our youth to design and create their own youth exchange mobility to address the needs that most interested them. Therefore, this project was written by the youth participants themselves. The young people identified a common problem in our respective communities that this project wished to address: there is a lack of youth activity and involvement at the local level. Adding to that, they realized that many young people struggle to keep up with their passions - they easily give up on their hobbies and activities they enjoy because of obligations overload (ex: high-school homework, extracurriculars, etc.). After working on these issues, the young people defined a set of issues that needed to be addressed: 1. Young people are apathetic and not motivated to take an active role for community development. They don’t know why they should work for it as they are not aware of its benefits. On the other hand, they are not aware of their own power and relevance to make an impact in their communities. 2- Youngsters don’t know how to organize their own local events. They don’t know what they should do to make a change as they are not aware of how to discover, work on and use their passions. Apart from the knowledge, they don’t have the skills needed to manage community events. 3- Young people are too absorbed by technologies that they forget to be in the ‘real world’. They choose to spend most of their free time in front of the screen rather than talking to people face to face. We decided to change this mindset and provide youngsters from our communities with a project experience that would help them understand that every step in a good direction matter, so any positive action they do, will be respected and useful for community. For these reasons, we wanted to empower youth to take a more active role in their community development by using their personal passions. In order to address the common problem that young people are not active in community development on the local level, and are not aware of how they can use their passions to address community problems, “The Passion Lab” project aspired to: 1) motivate and empower young people for active involvement in local communities, and 2) inspire youngsters to use their personal passions, interests, talents, and hobbies for creation of non-formal learning opportunities for other youth. Specifically, with the active participation of 30 young people from 5 countries, in the stages of preparation, implementation and monitoring, the objectives of this project were to: 1) encourage young people to work on their self-esteem and help them learn about their dynamics, importance and strength in terms of impact on their community. 2) empower the youth to take an active role in the development of the community, discovering and using their personal interests in a direction of positive change. 3) inspire young people to start exploiting their time in a more qualitative way, which will contribute positively to the life of the local community. 4) provide young people with the knowledge and skills needed to take the initiative to create events and projects that will be organized by young people in their communities. 5) give young people opportunities to gain event management skills through a real-world experience, this event organization for the local community.