# THE MOTIVATION According to the National Youth Agency "Young people spend 85% of their waking hours each year outside of school hours. It is imperative that they have access to safe places to have fun, meet friends and learn new skills, with a trained and trusted adult who knows what is needed. However, there is little or no provision for young people in many rural areas. Young people living in rural areas are too often ignored, which makes them vulnerable to isolation, loneliness and poor mental health." This is a problem and challenge that extends to the whole of Europe. No matter how many opportunities are created for young people, the truth is that barriers to participation and consequent development still prevail and are particularly relevant when young people come from rural backgrounds or face fewer opportunities. Rather than being a current problem and challenge, it is a real challenge for the future of young people. Without access to learning opportunities of the necessary quality, young people end up not developing fully (especially in terms of developing key skills for lifelong learning). They don't have access to key experiences for developing a sense of entrepreneurship, resilience, adaptation and creativity, while they are on the way up through detours or personal, social and financial instability. In addition to the clear effect on young people and their life path, this problem aggravates community and social development, which loses the opportunity to benefit from the added value and potential of its young people (who are forced to look for new opportunities outside their own environment). YPARD (2020) states that "When young people are involved at a practical and operational level, rural development will certainly develop in a more effective and sustainable way. This would prove how useful and effective the development of this sector is for the economy as a whole and the opportunities it creates for young people and the population in general." So, this is a common priority and not just an important one for the youth sector. # PROJECT IDEA With this in mind, we developed the Let's Connect YOU(th)! project. Faced with the social problem of young people's exclusion from community and participatory systems, we launched a project aimed at developing key skills for lifelong learning through non-formal activities. To this end, before embarking on any action with young people, it made sense for us to work with youth workers (YWs). They intervene and deal with young people and their difficulties. Therefore, in order for their response to be of high quality and innovative, it is crucial that we promote moments of training, professional specialization, transfer of practices and knowledge and methodological discovery. Only in this way has it been possible to increase youth activities, with a view to the effective social inclusion of the youngest groups and the consequent social transformation. # NEEDS Our experience with the technicians who work in the field with young people has enabled us to identify a number of needs, such as: - Promoting training and empowerment activities (skills development) that are reflected in improved capacities for working with young people; - Promoting the sharing, reflection, learning and transfer of good practices and knowledge between technicians with different realities and experiences in order to add value to daily actions with young people; - Encourage European and collaborative work between youth workers in the field of youth; - Encourage the recognition of non-formal methods for working with young people and for developing key competences with them. # OBJECTIVES In order to respond to the problem and consequent needs, we have defined the following objectives: a. General - To promote social inclusion and community participation among young people. b. Specific - To enable youth workers to develop skills and knowledge that allow them to work with young people in a quality and innovative way; - Develop mobility opportunities for non-formal learning to improve the skills of youth workers and the youth sector; - Increase the quality of the projects and activities run by the YOTs for young people by creating a community of sharing and learning; - Create opportunities to identify youth inclusion tools for replication and exploitation.