In Hopeland, we are living and working as an eco-community. Organisations in our network -especially our partners in E+ projects- are fascinated by the dimension of community living, and often want to learn more about key elements of it, to apply them in their own communities. We created We All Live In A Yellow Submarine project as a chance to meet this need. We identified CONFLICT TRANSFORMATION as one of the essential key elements that make a community work. We analysed the role of conflicts and their handling in the context of our own community, we identified key competences related to it, and proposed the project to our partners, giving them the possibility of an in-depth look into the life of our community, learning conflict competences out of it. We started from the observation that often organisations have the desire to build stronger communities, and to empower the communities that they work for, but just as often they tend to underrate the role of conflicts in these processes. We see conflicts as a natural part of interactions: a sign that diversity, change, growth are present and asking for space. Conflicts aren’t the problem: the problem is that we didn’t learn how to use them constructively, so that our relationships and opportunities can grow. It’s a paradox: we connect conflicts to uncomfortable emotions, we avoid them or act aggressively. We fear losing the cohesion, harmony and union we desire. But: if conflicts keep being a taboo, it stays hard to open authentic and inclusive dialogues that will bring to the cohesion we desire, and we will lose opportunities to organise better, make clear agreements, grow stronger relationships, learn new skills, and grow out of the necessity to find solutions. COMMUNITY LIVING is the perfect context to experience all this: communities are the “place” where individuals meet society, and interaction happens on a regular basis, therefore also conflicts arise out of the diversity of needs. Concretely, we included under the term community: the partner organisations, where the involved youth workers work or volunteer, the target groups they interact with, the local context they act in, and their personal network. WHY Our mission in Hopeland is to contribute to ecology. Taking a wide perspective, to contribute to ecology means to contribute to diversity. This is true also at a social level: making sure that different needs, experiences and identities can find space in our communities, fostering authentic democracy. With Yellow Submarine, our final aim was to contribute to this value, by learning to transform conflicts into opportunities for dialogue in the context of community living. OBJECTIVES - To offer the youth workers new perspectives and approaches to deal with conflicts with a special focus on community contexts. - To equip the youth workers with specific competences (knowledge, skills, attitudes, behaviours) to address conflict situations with or within their communities. - To offer the youth workers a first hand experience of life in an eco-community, to dive deep and get concrete in the dynamics and processes involved. - To offer each youth worker the chance to develop personal skills in line with their own personality, to be able to concretely apply conflict transformation methods in the communities of their youth-work. - To spread these new methods in all partner organisations and on a bigger scale, through implementation workshops. - To evaluate the project and its impact through questionnaires.