By implementing the Listeners Gathering project, our goal was to provide youth workers with competencies, methodologies, and tools that they could use to create safe and non-judgmental environments for young people, where they could be listened to with empathy and support. Our guiding principles were equality and compassion, more specifically, the belief that each young person should be treated as an individual and a human being, irrespective of their background. Our primary intention was to foster genuine listening - listening to ourselves in order to identify emotions and needs, and to others to promote mutual understanding. THE RATIONALE: Deeper and more authentic communication between youth workers and young people enables them to better understand their situation and needs and helps the youngsters open up and take a closer, honest look at their life situation. By this, we wanted to support them in raising their self-awareness and authenticity, which leads to making more conscious life choices and brings more clarity in knowing what their real motivations and interests are and how to follow them. By actively listening to and supporting young people, we wanted to bring them empowerment and accountability as well as prevent radicalisation in order for them to find more long-term happiness and fulfilment. Acknowledging all this, the common need between our partner organisations was to develop listening, communication, and coaching competencies of our youth workers as we aimed to reinforce the connection with the youth we work with by bringing authentic, empathetic, and quality support. As such, during the 12 months of the project, 24 youth workers from 8 programme countries (Poland, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Spain, Italy, Hungary, Malta and Turkey) would reach the following specific objectives: 1. gain knowledge about the principles of Nonviolent Communication and the basics of Coaching, as well as, about methods developing self-awareness and mindfulness, especially as a tool to connect with, understand, support and empower youth; 2. develop skills of active listening, asking open and supportive questions, communicating with empathy and implementing methods helping to reconnect with own needs, emotions and values; 3. acquire a nonjudgmental attitude of empathy and compassion while communicating with youth and supporting them on their life paths as well as readiness to implement self-awareness, mindfulness and basic coaching methods into youth work. After participating in this project, the youth workers would go back to their NGOs and be equipped with a new approach to how to reach, guide, listen to and communicate with young people, which would contribute to establishing better relationships with them and would support them by developing their self-awareness and the understanding of their life choices. Moreover, these youth workers could offer workshops on the basic principles of NVC or mindfulness to the young people they work with, so they could learn the basics of those methods too and use them in their daily lives.