With the international encounters in 2025, we pursued four main objectives: _Reaching young people who have been underrepresented in cross-border learning mobility programmes and encouraging them to participate in international encounters, especially young people with fewer educational opportunities, cultural differences, special health conditions, queer young people, and young people from rural areas (the latter applies primarily to young people from international partner organisations). _Enabling young people to have a positive experience of diversity, interculturalism and European citizenship through participation in an international encounter; promoting mutual learning and building friendships across linguistic and cultural boundaries; _Involve young people as intensively as possible in the planning, design and implementation of the encounters and motivate them to become more socially or voluntarily involved after the encounters; _Assign former participants from previous years the role of (co-)team members, prepare them for this role and accompany them throughout the process; _Accompany and support young people in engaging with Youth Goals and sustainability issues; _Train full-time and volunteer staff in (international) youth work to develop participatory measures together with young people that reflect their interests and living environments. In order to reach young people with fewer opportunities, we worked in Leipzig as part of the wir weit weg (we far away) project with secondary schools (combined secondary and intermediate schools), where we approached young people, won them over to participate in the project and familiarised them with the format of international encounters in a participatory group process, involved them in the planning and prepared them for the encounter. In this way, we reached young people from challenging socio-economic and family backgrounds, young people with migration backgrounds, young people with learning difficulties and disabilities, and young people with mental health issues. We selected international partner organisations with a focus on their work with disadvantaged young people. There are differences between our partner institutions – for example, the municipality of Haninge runs youth clubs in marginalised residential areas and recruits young people there; the Associacion NewPa from Santander in Spain works with educationally disadvantaged young people; Network Senza Confini in Italy mainly reaches young people in rural areas through locally based services; Hermete in Italy offers programmes in the field of youth career assistance, among other things, and therefore has increased contact with young people who have not completed their schooling. (This selection of examples is not to be considered exhaustive.)