Traditional ways of teaching and learning are not providing youth anymore with the proper skills and competencies required by the labour market and society’s development. Old and ineffective teaching practices should be replaced by innovative learning techniques that put youth in the middle of their learning process. Experiential learning is adding an essential ingredient to youth education, which is self-reflection about the things we are experiencing daily, both in school and outside of it. The labour market today is more and more demanding, the competition between candidates is acerbic and the need to provide specific skills and competencies has gained great importance. We cannot neglect the benefits and added-value that non- formal activities bring to the personal and professional development of youth. The reason why so much attention is given to this segment of education is that it has been acknowledged that formal education cannot supply anymore what young people need for their personal and professional development. Although we still witness a monopoly of formal education institutions, non-formal education contributes more and more to the lifelong learning process and to the development of human capital. If we take a look at recent statistics we notice that the youth unemployment rate in the EU is around twice as high as the rate for the total population throughout the last decade and youth rates are generally much higher than unemployment rates for all ages (EUROSTAT, 2019). These numbers are highly concerning and give a signal of alarm regarding the lack of correlation between the education provided by formal education institutions and the requirements of the labour market. Hence the appearance of non-formal education programs, as a result of the fact that the output of school classes is incompatible with the requirements of the employers. Jennifer Groff, a co-founder of Centre for Curriculum Redesign, considers that an innovative learning environment can only be created if the youth is actively engaged in learning, and his understanding is based on a connection between emotions, motivations and cognition. In this context, our project offered the possibility to experience a unique combination of “laboratory” and “market” and to discover tools for learning & teaching, developed under the European Union Erasmus + programme. A space to share, to experiment, to discuss and further develop such tools used within different activities in the youth field (Forum Theatre, living library, role play etc.). The aim of the project was to enhance the development of new non-formal teaching methods in different field of studies. The link to our project and Erasmus+ KA1 objectives was: “support the professional development of those who work in education, training and youth with a view to innovating and improving the quality of teaching, training and youth work across Europe”. Our objectives were: • To increase the competencies of 30 youth workers, trainers, youth leaders from 9 different countries, in designing and delivering new activities based on the experiential learning model; • To enforce the synergies between formal and non-formal education by creating a toolkit with tested experiential tools, available for free for youth workers; • To capitalise the power of experiential learning for organisational development of the parties involved. • To prepare quality non-formal project based on experimental learning among EU and EECA countries, matching the new requirements of Erasmus+ program with their organization; • To offer the opportunity of meeting possible partner groups among EU and EECA countries. Some of the needs that we came up and tackled were: • Trainers/Educators don’t use experimental learning as a tool used by non-formal education. • Lack of knowledge for Erasmus+ and European programs in general • Not having sufficient tools for experimental learning activities. • Not having a youth forum for dialogue and project opportunities (including funding). • Lack of information about the connection between formal and non-formal education