From a young age, we are taught that maintaining physical health and practicing basic daily hygiene (shower, brush our teeth, wash our hands…) is important but we are rarely taught to look after our mental health as if maintaining emotional balance and a mature management of our thoughts would be innate to everyone. Yet every day, people and especially young people struggle with mental distress and mental disorder. Proper mental hygiene is a subject that is often ignored and pushed aside by institutions and because it is rarely addressed outside of the medical context, youth worker active in this field face many challenges. Social inclusion is one of the most important aspects of a modern mental health service and one of our biggest challenges. Over the past 40 years we have moved away from the old asylum model, which was a deliberate act of social exclusion, towards a much more integrated community model of care and we believe that a holistic approach comprising personal, societal and institutional approaches is the best way to insure that young people step into adulthood as mentally stable people and not emotionally damaged by their teenage year, which everybody know are critical in a person’s development. Our project has 3 main objectives: - Prevention: promoting mental hygiene and mental wellbeing in everyday life - Management: provide solution to overcome common youth emotional distress - Rehabilitation: inclusion of young people with emotional distress/mental issue/ mental disorders The first step toward this is to equip youth workers with innovative methods to help youngsters regularly maintain psychological balance. Mental distress such as anxiety disorders, panic disorder, phobias, depression and eating disorders leads to self-isolation, stigmatisation and exclusion. We propose methods that both foster mental hygiene and help with the inclusion on emotionally distressed youth in groups via activities promoting cooperation, tolerance, empathy, trust and mutual support. Our project focus on practicing healthy physical activities, understanding and expressing ones feelings and emotions, preventing substance abuse and raising empathy and inclusion of young people suffering with emotional distress. In the frame of our project, we decided to create a training course including a mix of activities to meet our objectives: - Artistic activities - Physical activities - Personal care activities. This specifically designed program aim to help youth worker design a tool box to promote self-care, self-expression, a sense of purpose and community and physical activity, all areas critical to foster a positive attitude toward mental health. Furthermore, these practices contribute to the positive personal development of the participants by building their self-esteem, creating more trust and more bonds between youngsters and by promoting inclusion of youngsters suffering from emotional distress. The effect of practicing these activities is much more than learning the activity itself, it is a process that can profoundly transform one’s vision of themselves and interaction with others and direct people towards a constructive and positive way of life. Our main objective is to give tool to youth workers to address youth mental health. Acquiring new pedagogical competences will enable them to: - Better responds to the needs of their target group - Improve the impact of their daily work - Raise the attractiveness and quality of their programs For our partners, having qualified staff is a crucial issue and they allocate many resources on training. Unfortunately, these same resources are diverted from educational program for the youngsters themselves. For this reason, we want to provide our partners with an opportunity to educate their staff, give them tools to reach different target groups and provide them with skills immediately applicable. We want to help them implement new educational program within their own organization, thus improving their quality and reach. During this project, we want to give an opportunity to all the participants, including us, to learn from each other and to reflect on the best practices to address the issue, raise public awareness and influence institutional policies. We want to publicly shade light on the issue of youth mental health and achieving this is a long process that we believe can be tackled by creating a strategic partnership between serious and committed partners. We are planning this training course with the vision of creating strong bonds between the partners and we foresee that the outcomes, apart from the increased capacity of the youth workers and the dissemination of good practices, will be the establishment of a solid cooperation base to move forward onto a second phase, a strategic partnership.