Our entire main goal as an organization is to open up youngsters coming from rural areas and let them discover that there is more beyond their own small borders of the context they are currently living in. This is what we have been aiming for and working on since the very start of the older Erasmus /Youth in Action and Erasmus+ programs, and it is an everlasting process since it is not easy to involve large numbers of youngsters in our projects and activities. Also, what we aim for is to make youngsters less xenophobic to anything new, strange, or weird (in their eyes), to eradicate assumptions, and to let them realize that there is more beyond the borders of their closed town and community in which they are born, raised, educated, and socialized. Out of culture, youngsters in the rural parts of Emmen, for instance, are more closed and reserved to anything that is happening outside the municipality; for instance, even a trip to Zwolle is an entire experience for some youngsters. We see the same with the youngsters coming from other countries but who also live in rural areas. In this way, they can see that they have something in common, and it is not needed to have this fear. Through our work, we want to make youngsters more open to other cultures, traditions, ways of thinking, opinions, ideas, etc. What we experienced in the past years is that Erasmus+ is a great tool in our youth work to open up youngsters from rural areas and to encounter the local population with other European youngsters. Another achievement we aimed for is to let youngsters experience that there are opportunities in rural areas as well, that there are ways to become employed and make a living in the countryside, and also to fill in the free time. Many youngsters believe that there is 'nothing to do' in the countryside, though when seeing other sides of Europe and when getting in contact with other European youngsters, we will let them experience ways on how they can both entertain themselves as well as get a taste on how similar/different life on the countryside is for youngsters throughout Europe. Since many youngsters lack the sense of taking initiative and becoming more entrepreneurial: meaning they make choices in life that are beneficial for their own development, we would like to focus on this aspect mainly in the organization of youth exchanges. How to take initiative when working and living together with other youngsters and how to cooperate and communicate more efficiently in order to achieve a result. This year we maintained the change of choice of accommodations: last year, they were all moved to the north, and in Drenthe. The different accommodations also brought awareness of our initiatives to locals, who shared about it in their network. We again had people even write about our projects in some local newspapers. We noticed how the environment of Drenthe also positively affects the participants, as they really appreciate the beauty of it throughout the projects. Of course, part of it is also the people they meet along the way - who are all open to find out more about our projects and the purpose of the activities for the participants. Participants were now fully-immersed in the northern countryside and most of them expressed how it helped them feel more connected to the group compared to other accommodations they had been in. Further objectives are written in our Erasmus+ accreditation, and further in the application is written which activity matched which objective.