Young people in today's society face many challenges and stress factors. High expectations at school and at home, competition and the pressure of social networks to be perfect have a significant impact on their mental well-being. This can result in mental health problems such as anxiety, depression and lack of self-confidence. Young people face mental distress and mental disorders every day. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), mental disorders affect one in four people at some point in their lives. Currently, around 450 million people suffer from them, making mental disorders one of the leading causes of ill health worldwide. Stigma and lack of support lead many to turn to substance abuse or worse. In addition, the Balkans have a history of conflict and tension. Unaddressed mental health problems contribute to social unrest, hinder peace-building efforts and contribute to violence and extremism. Addressing mental wellbeing can reduce the risk of radicalisation and contribute to greater social cohesion and mutual understanding between different groups and ethnicities, helping to sustain peace in the Balkans. Mental well-being is key to creating stable, peaceful and healthy societies. Mental hygiene is a topic that is often ignored and pushed aside by institutions, and as it is rarely addressed outside a medical context, youth workers working in this field face many challenges. Social inclusion is one of the most important aspects of modern mental health services and one of our greatest challenges. Over the last 40 years we have moved from the old asylum model, which tended towards deliberate social exclusion, to a much more integrated community model of care and we believe that a holistic approach, involving personal, social and institutional approaches, is the best way to ensure that young people enter adulthood as mentally stable people and that the teenage period, which is crucial for individual development, will not emotionally damage them. Our project had three main objectives: - Prevention: promoting mental hygiene and mental well-being in everyday life. - Management: providing solutions to overcome the common emotional distress of young people. - Rehabilitation: to integrate young people with emotional distress/mental health problems/mental disorders. The first step towards this was equipping youth workers with innovative methods to help young people maintain their mental balance on a regular basis. Our project focused on practicing healthy physical activities, understanding and expressing one's feelings and emotions, and increasing empathy and involvement of young people suffering from emotional distress. As part of our project, we develop a training for youth workers that included a combination of activities to achieve our goals: - Physical activities - activities that contribute to inclusive communication - Personal care activities. The aim of this specially designed programme was to help youth workers to develop a toolkit to promote self-care, self-expression, foster a sense of belonging and community, and physical activity, all areas that are key to fostering positive attitudes towards mental well-being. In addition, these practices contributed to the positive personal development of the participants by strengthening their self-esteem, creating more trust and more bonds between young people, and promoting the inclusion of young people suffering from emotional distress. The aim of our activity was to give youth workers tools to help them address the mental well-being of the young people they work with. Acquiring new pedagogical competences enabled them to: - respond better to the needs of their target group - improve the impact of their daily work - increase the attractiveness, reach and quality of their programmes For our partners, qualified staff is crucial and they devote significant resources to train their youth workers. We therefore wanted to offer partners the opportunity to train their staff, to give them the tools to better reach different target groups and to make the knowledge gained from our training immediately applicable. We wanted to help them to implement the new training programme in their organisation and thus improve the quality of youth work in general. That is why we also created a manual of methods and tools for mental well-being, which we shared with partners and other stakeholders. Throughout this project, we wanted to give participants the opportunity to learn from each other and reflect on best practices to tackle this issue, raise public awareness and influence institutional policies.