The project was the result of EYFA’s current strategic approach, as well as the vivid interest of our network members. Climate justice, our long-term goal and focus, has been critically assessed in the past years; the Youth Organizations Decolonizing Activism reflected some of the questions around it. What is the intersection between racial and social justice and climate justice? Is environmental justice accessible to everyone? How to include marginalized voices and experiences in the movement, that is already established in Europe? What is the decolonial approach and how can it be put in practice? How to be involved in a sustainable, non-harmful way, build the alliances and create inclusive movement? To answer the questions above and open the floor for fruitful and interesting discussion we came up with the programme of Youth Exchange in collaboration with 2 partner organizations. Black Earth Kollektiv, a BIPoC only, and majority Black run and youth led environmental justice collective based in Berlin provided the content and the facilitation. Their vision, expertise and impressive mobilization skills helped us significantly to shape the objectives and the outcomes. ULEX – CEA, an educational center from Catalonia, has a huge experience in non-formal education, with including learners from multicultural backgrounds and at risk of exclusion. Thanks to their methodologies we could not only include all the needs and expectations of everyone involved in the projects, but also create an inclusive and supportive learning environment. Objectives: 1. To support the connection amongst and exchange between young people with fewer opportunities who are most affected by climate change and at risk of general social exclusion, also due to the impact of the Covid19 pandemic. To empower them in developing movements which best serve them and their communities. 2. To capitalise on young people's optimism about the future and motivation to fight for climate justice (as evidenced by school strikes): to seize this moment and build capacity within movements for climate justice, fostering the civic participation of young people and youth workers with fewer opportunities. 3. To support youth led civic groups working with issues of climate justice to be effective, sustainable and diverse by: • Understanding barriers to participation • Identifying ways to dismantle barriers and be accessible, relevant and inclusive • Embedding effective facilitation skills to support dialogue & collaboration across different identities • Developing greater competence to skillfully navigate diversity & discrimination within organisations • Exchanging best practice intercultural, collaborative learning environments. All 3 objectives were met. In particular we are satisfied with the objective 1; we managed to gather people with fewer opportunities, marginalized voices and at risk of exclusion due to their background, identity or health. The time they spent together allowed them to connect, share, make plans together. The temporary community we build, with the right support of facilitators and organizers, resulted in powerful collaboration and quality time. This will be carried further to the local groups and initiatives. Though not everyone brought the optimism (Objective 2), which in understandable is today’s world, the synergy was present. By addressing challenging topics, like discrimination, trauma, exploitation etc. we modeled the behaviors, that can be adequate in civic engagement, especially by youth from marginalized positions. The objective 3 was ambitious and some of its aspects we tackled superficially, still we found it useful and hopefully enough to be further explored by participants. The barriers of participation and the ways of dismantling them were broadly discussed and analyzed during the sessions, based on case studies prepared by the facilitators. With inputs delivered in various forms as the starting points we designed and led the participator exercises, in which young people had the opportunity to deepen the understanding of diversity, intercultural and international aspects and intersectionality of system of oppressions. Toward the end of the exchange participants were working on steps, which helps to critically assess groups and communities in order to identify the pitfalls of hierarchies or discriminatory practices or obstacles on the way to mutual and sustainable collaboration for the climate change. What was missing or underrepresented in the programme was the facilitations skills and tools, simply caused by lack of time. Instead we provided links and materials and invited people to educate themselves. The topic was mentioned as important in group work and movement building, the facilitation happened on the spot and could be observed, the team stayed open to answer any questions – by all that we covered part of Objective 3. All parties agreed, that YODA was a valuable and successful gathering.