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Show Your Mind

2024-3-IT03-KA152-YOU-0002871872024Mobility of young peoplefinalized
Countries: IT|TR|SE|HR|PL|PT|RO · Grant: €49,967
Creativity, arts and culturePhysical and mental health, well-beingDigital skills and competences

Objectives

Show Your Mind was created to help young people explore mental well-being in a real, practical, and human way. We wanted to create a space where young people could speak more openly about mental health, feel less alone in their struggles, and learn through experience rather than only through theory. The project was built on the idea that well-being does not grow only inside the individual. It also grows through trust, peer support, safe spaces, and meaningful connections with the community. This is why we used theater and film-making as our main tools: they helped participants express emotions, reflect on their own lives, listen to others, and turn personal and social issues into something visible and shared. The project had four main objectives. First, we wanted to help young people reduce the negative impact of social media on their mental health, by reflecting on unrealistic standards, harmful content, screen time, and misinformation. Second, we wanted to strengthen peer support and understanding, by encouraging open conversations about mental health, reducing shame and stigma, and building empathy, listening, and support skills. Third, we wanted to address academic and career pressure, especially fear of failure, unrealistic expectations, stress, and anxiety, while helping participants discover practical coping strategies. Fourth, we wanted to improve access to informal mental health support by promoting self-help strategies, peer support, community-based well-being actions, and safe spaces where young people could speak freely and feel supported. At the same time, we had wider aims that were also very important for us. We wanted participants to discover, in an experiential learning context, how their own well-being can be strengthened through meaningful relationships with others and with their communities. We wanted them not only to reflect on mental health, but also to act on it. For this reason, the project aimed to connect young people with local organisations, public actors, and community realities in Taranto, while showing that youth can be active changemakers when they are given trust, tools, and safe spaces. We also wanted to encourage intergenerational dialogue and contact with people from different backgrounds, so that mental well-being would not stay a closed topic inside the youth exchange, but become something shared with the wider community. This was strongly linked to the project’s community-action and peer-support dimension. From the point of view of youth work practice, the project was also meant to create results that could continue after the mobility. One of our key aims was to help participants build long-term peer support habits and informal support systems that they could bring back home. We wanted the mobility to become a starting point for lasting change through self-help practices, stronger peer networks, community-based initiatives, films, and other outputs that could keep the conversation alive after the project ended. The project also linked clearly to the priorities of Erasmus+ and to the European Youth Goals. In particular, it strongly addressed inclusion and diversity, because it aimed to involve young people with fewer opportunities and to create a supportive space where different life stories, barriers, and needs could be heard and respected. It also addressed participation in democratic life, because the project encouraged young people to become active in their communities, take part in public dialogue, and communicate social messages through creative tools and community action. Finally, it strongly addressed mental well-being, especially in line with the European Youth Goal on mental health and well-being, by giving young people tools, confidence, and shared spaces to care for themselves and support each other. This direction is also in line with the feedback collected after the exchange. In the participant reports filled by group leaders, participants were consistently seen as benefiting from the mobility, gaining ideas linked to inclusion and diversity, democratic participation, and digital awareness, while also showing growth in personal, social, citizenship, cultural, and digital competences. The same reports also show that the exchange was largely considered to have met participants’ needs and expectations, and that the involvement of young people, the quality of non-formal methods, and the impact on the local community were evaluated positively.

Project partners (7)