"Bridges Across Cultures: A Better Youth Dialogue and Cooperation for the Future," is our organization's first Youth Exchange project which aimed at bringing together 45 young people from 7 different EU and candidate state countries, in order to better understand the principles, values of the European Union as a whole, together with presenting them with the importance of intercultural dialogue and active citizenshup In summarizing our project, our principal aim was to foster greater intercultural understanding and tolerance among youth. This initiative sought to create opportunities for young individuals from diverse cultural backgrounds to collaborate, cultivating their leadership, problem-solving, and decision-making skills. Initially outlined in our project proposal, our objectives were multifaceted: - To facilitate the organization of joint projects and activities, bringing together young individuals from varied cultural contexts. - To offer trainings and workshops focused on intercultural dialogue and cooperation, enriching participants' knowledge and skills in these areas. - To provide enriching experiences aimed at enhancing youths' intercultural understanding and empathy, thereby broadening their perspectives. - To encourage collaboration among young people from different cultural backgrounds in addressing societal issues, leveraging their diverse viewpoints for innovative solutions. - To nurture young leaders' problem-solving skills, promoting an appreciation for cultural diversity as a valuable asset. Additionally, a significant goal was to elevate the Netherlands' profile among European youth, fostering international cultural exchange. We anticipated that our project would not only positively influence future initiatives but also showcase our country effectively on the global stage. We wished to create an environment where young people can exchange ideas and perceptions regarding the intercultural dialogue, cultural awareness and diversity, by having in-depth discussions and seminars regarding the topics at hand, as well as sessions about discrimination, identifying its roots, major arguments, and analyzing them from an objective point of view. Participating nations have been carefully selected based on their relations with multiculturalism in an effort to bring together highly diverse opinions and perceptions about the issues at hand. Having participants from countries created for a very diverse environment, where youth could talk about various national perspectives, resulting in interesting and proactive debates as well as solutions to fight discrimination and intolerance. However, after the initial project proposal - we realised that we got the opportunity to do more than only these objectives. As our youth exchange had so much diversity with participants from all around the world. We realised that we could get them to cooperate and work together according to the 'learning by doing method' alligning to Allport's intergroup contact theory. We ensured that all conditions are met for positive intergroup contact theory with everybody having an equal status, common goals, supporting their intergroup cooperation as a the organising team consortium. We did this according to the use of focussing on the 8 key competences of the youthpass, deepening on each key competence through different methods. As the project topic was about intercultural dialogue, we naturally had a bigger focus on the personal, social and learning to learn competence; the cultural awareness and expression competence; and the citizenship competence. Nevertheless, we brought in elements of other competences as well which will be further explained in the final report. By this great cooperation between the different national teams, with members from all over the world - they got the opportunities to collaborate not only the non-formal sessions, but also on other things such as cooking and cleaning. This was of course not without challenges, but we are proud to have bridged over them as a collective group.