Statistics published by the United Nations in 2023, show that 55% of the people in the world live in urbanised areas. This number is increasing and is projected to reach 68% by the year 2050. There are a number of reasons why people are moving towards cities including work and prospects for a better life. Various studies carried out including a study by Cook, Weaver, Hutton, & McGraw (2017), shows that urbanisation is affecting the human brain and in some ways it is affecting it negatively. Urbanisation brings with it a totally new environment, one that is completely different than when living in the countryside and an environment that brings with it a lot of stressors that are all the time “pinging” on the brain. Some of these stressors include overcrowding, polluted environment, traffic, high levels of violence, and reduced social support. Research shows that young people are even more prone to suffer from mental health problems due to the detachment from nature and urbanisation (Onwunaka & Nwimo, 2012). Statistics by the World Health Organization (2022), state that: - 16% of the global burden of disease and injury in individuals aged 13-19 is attributed to mental health conditions. - Around half of all mental health conditions commence by the age of 14, yet a majority of these cases remain undetected and untreated. This is due to the fact that at this time youth are passing from a stage of moratorium and identity crisis and some mental health issues can be left undiagnosed. Depression has been on the increase year after year from 2015 (Bell and Blanchflower, 2021). In the 15-19 age bracket, suicide ranks as the fourth most common cause of death. Last year during 2023, unfortunately we heard a number of accounts of people committing suicide, which shows that the mental health problems are on the rise. As youth workers, we have been noticing that there has been an increase in mental health conditions amongst the youth that we work with. This trend has been on the increase for the last few years and spiked with the pandemic. After the pandemic other stressors came in like the wars in Ukraine and Palestine, the uncertainty facing the world and inflation. These are some of the stressors that are stressing out people including youth and thus leading to rise in mental health problems. These phenomena and realities are things that our youth workers are seeing on a day to day basis with the youth that we work with. We have unfortunately even faced situations of young people who committed self-harm and also someone who tried to commit suicide. As we are facing an ever increasing issue in this area, we have tried to understand what is happening and also what we can do to address this issue. As some of our youth workers have knowledge of outdoor education in general, it was decided to carry out a literature review to get a deeper understanding of the topic and specifically as more of a therapeutic method. Through the review, they found out more on the topic of outdoor and wilderness therapy and how it is being used in some countries and the positive effects it is having. Thus they asked us as partners to give them training on this and to also combine it with mental health to better understand what are the realities that young people are facing today in the area of mental health. The main aim of the project were that of helping the participants to better understand how they can make use of wilderness therapy when working with youth, especially youth with mental health issues. The objectives were the following: Objective 1: To learn more on what the mental health issues that young people today are facing in our urbanised communities. Participants will go into depth about each mental health issue and how they can best support the youth in each case. Objective 2: Learn more about wilderness therapy and its effectiveness and benefits. Objective 3: To learn more on how to make use of wilderness therapy and also how best to use it with the young people that we work with on a daily basis. Objective 4: Learn new outdoor tools that can be used with youth and also learn the benefits behind such tools. After the training, the youth workers that attend were better equipped with knowledge, tools and experience in the area of youth mental health and how to make use of wilderness therapy and the outdoors to help these young people passing from mental health issues.