The overall project goal is to equip young people with fewer opportunities with knowledge, techniques and competences how to live a happier and fulfilled life, and to foster wellbeing in their communities by combining game-based community-building practices with advocacy work and training youth workers as health & wellbeing coaches to provide better assistance to young people and thus increase the quality of European youth work. Specific project objectives are split in 4 dimensions: 1. Individual Mental Health: support awareness raising of young people and youth workers about mental health & wellbeing and develop a methodology to foster well-being through non-formal learning methods. 2. Collective Mental Health: develop competences of young people in community-based initiatives with a focus on sustainability, ecological awareness and collaboration (with a possibility for the schools and non-formal learning institutions to use this model). 3. Empowerment: empower young people use all the created tools in the project and become role models for other young people and communities to engage in a change process. 4. Advocacy: empower young people to become role models in the community and influence policy
Our partnership has applied for this project based on the premise there was a big need to work on the topic of mental health amongst youth, especially after the pandemic. We also applied for this project with the idea that we saw a lot of youthworkers wanting to have access to tools and knowledge to work with this topic in an easy accessible format which can help them support youngsters before their situation turns very serious or clinical. The context was that a combination of isolation, inactivity and a broader loss of purpose due to strict lockdown measures imposed by Covid-19 outbreak in 2020-2021 left many young people close to breakdown. Our project addressed the following needs: 1. Development of a model and tools to better deal with the fear of uncertainty, building resilience and raising awareness of what can support one's well-being in times of various challenges on societal level, incl. pos-pandemic period. 2. Equipping and empowering of youthworkers to become well-being coaches 3. Supporting young people cope to find new meaning in their lives through self-care practices tailor-made for youth. 4. Lastly our project has contributed to the need for support and conversation on a community level.