Improve the quality of youth work implemented within umbrella debate education organisations through Europe We established these concrete aims through a fourfold set of reasons: Firstly, because we recognise debate as an educational tool that helps build essential skills. Research shows that debate education strengthens the civic attitude of youth, due to allowing them to engage, connect, and mobilise with other youth on topics of their interest. Research furthermore shows that it helps build essential critical thinking skills, makes people look at the news with a critical eye, and build other 21st-century skills such as cooperative teamwork abilities. It finally helps build research and learning skills. Crucially, debate education excels in non-formal learning environments with peer-to-peer learning, which can reach underserved communities. Strengthening this tool across European communities confers these important benefits. Secondly, in order to foster vibrant debate communities, volunteers and youth workers need to upscale their capacities and learn from European-wide best practices. Training is now too often done on an ad hoc basis, and trainers lack the ability to learn from best practices elsewhere. In other words, the youth work conducted is often scattered and isolated, which hampers the ability of practitioners to effectively organise youth work through debate and spread this tool. Thirdly, European debate organisations do not have enough opportunities to exchange knowledge and experiences about how to promote debate and a lot of knowledge is currently lost. Organisations often rely on a few active students, who remain with the organisation for a maximum of 3-5 years, leaving no replacements behind and training methodologies are often not shared. Cooperation usually takes place only through personal channels which are not accessible to newer organisations. Specifically in the context of the covid pandemic this means that a large amount of formal and informal knowledge has been lost and needs to be regained through a focused effort. Fourthly, the goals were refined through an in-network survey of prior trainers and participants of earlier like-minded projects. They suggested strengthening the depth of training of trainers and including more participatory activities. On the basis of that feedback and the above aims these criteria were set.