Butterfly Effect: the Next Generation is a project to improve the quality of youth work by equipping youth workers with conflict transformation skills, using Embodiment as a main methodology. This project is a follow up of Butterfly Effect (2019-3-CZ01-KA105-076915) that was rewarded as a good practice. Receiving feedback about the benefits that our participants and partners had, we decided to apply with an integrated version of that project: implementing here the acquired learning, and making it available to more people. NEEDS CONFLICT TRANSFORMATION Learning to deal with conflicts constructively can lower the level of anxiety, and activate resources, being a game changer. Youth work involves inclusion of diversity, with all the struggles connected to it; growth and the process of testing boundaries; engagement, motivation and their challenges; and complex processes of cooperation among different people, just to name a few. No wonder that conflicts happen: they are part of the job rather than an exception. In the last few years, we noticed an increasing anxiety around macro themes: economical crisis, climate change, the social changes brought by the pandemic, the war happening within Europe. Old models are no more applicable, new ones are still “in the making”. Especially youngsters are extremely affected and under pressure: they are at the same time the generations with no hope for the future, and the ones supposed to change the current reality. The need to handle conflicts is on the foreground at the moment, at all levels: personal, interpersonal and social. Youth work is confronted on a daily basis with this. Yet, conflicts are experienced as a block, a failure, they bring about emotions like shame and mistrust, and very rarely they are seen as a necessary opportunity for reorganisation, for stronger connections, for needed change, inclusion and integration, learning and growth. We observed that an important key to tackle this complexity is emotional intelligence, and with this project we focused on this aspect of conflict transformation skills. EMBODIMENT Embodiment is a very powerful tool for conflict transformation: the body reveals emotions, reactions, beliefs and assumptions. This allowed us to identify the levels that really needed to be tackled, beyond cognitive, in order to learn new ways. From a learning perspective body-based learning processes allowed deeper self-awareness, expression and reflection beyond words. Through the body the learning could be elaborated and integrated at a deeper level, and the experiences anchored in a way that limited anxiety and created space. From an inclusion perspective: The vast majority of discrimination and social exclusion is body based (racism, ageism, ableism, misogyny, homo and transphobia…) excluding the body dimension from learning processes and social movement is contributing to keeping the status quo. Setting a body based learning process, we aimed at empowering people with different bodies, and promote their ability to be agents of inclusion. We used our physical body as a domain of change and conflict transformation: - to understand & integrate the concepts introduced during the PDA more effectively - to bring the elements of emotions and attitude to the foreground of conflict transformation - to create context, and impact on others: intentionally connecting the verbal and non verbal expression, using voice, proximity, posture - to build competence in observation of other people, connecting to the needs behind the behaviours -to access different broader possibilities for expression: to react to conflicts beyond automatic responses, towards proactivity and accountability. NEEDS OF YOUTH WORKERS, according to what we collected from our partners: 1 Getting in contact -in non threatening ways- with the emotions that are present in conflictual situations 2 Getting skills to lower the level of anxiety in front of conflicts, and de-escalate heated emotions 3 Developing the ability to express emotions in constructive ways, and creating the conditions for authentic dialogue 4 Being able to develop meaning and learning from challenging situations and conflicts 5 Learning communication skills in order to take conflict situations as opportunities to organize work in a more competent way OBJECTIVES: -To offer the youth workers new perspectives and approaches on how to deal with conflicts, focusing especially on emotional intelligence and emotional agility, and using body/embodiment as a tool when interacting with their target groups -To equip participating youth workers with competences to transform conflicts with their target groups into learning opportunities, using embodiment as main methodology -To spread competent conflict handling methods and embodied techniques in all partner organizations and on a bigger scale, through the implementation phase -To evaluate the project and its impact through questionnaires and follow up activities.