The project grew out of a concrete need, not from an idea designed at a desk. It surfaced during a residential follow-up weekend that Associazione Joint organised in September 2024 with the young people who, in the preceding months, had taken part in that summer's Erasmus+ youth exchanges. Over those days, as they shared their mobility experiences with one another, many of them realised they had the same impression: for the first time they had come across ways of learning quite different from those school had accustomed them to — group work, experiential learning, peer discussion — and they had seen first-hand how powerfully these approaches engage, include and help people grow. From those conversations came the question that shaped the whole project: why should all of this remain confined to exchanges abroad, lived by a few and for just a few days, instead of entering everyday life, schools, associations and the local spaces where these young people actually live? Around this question we built the project's underlying objective: to create real opportunities for young people to participate in their own local context — opportunities in which they would not merely be recipients of activities designed by others, but protagonists in shaping and running them. From the very start we chose that this leading role should concern, first and foremost, young people with fewer opportunities: 8 of the 15 members of the coordination group (53%), were young people carrying social, cultural or educational barriers, reached through Associazione Joint's MiWay network and local residential care communities. The same criterion guided how we opened the activities to the wider city: across all the project's actions we reached a total of 78 young people with fewer opportunities. Inclusion, in short, was not a theme to set alongside the others, but the criterion through which we built every objective and designed every activity. The specific objectives pursued by the project were: - To increase youth participation in local life, strengthening young people's role in decision-making and giving them concrete tools to express ideas, engage with others and enter into dialogue with organisations, associations and institutions, moving beyond the widespread notion that participating simply means being present at an event. - To promote non-formal education not as a subject to be explained but as a method to be practised: a tool able to involve diverse groups, lower the barriers to participation, facilitate dialogue and encourage critical thinking, one that can be tested within school as well and is particularly effective in giving voice and a role to young people with fewer opportunities. - To strengthen the coordination group's transversal competences — teamwork, communication, autonomy, organisation and event management — through monthly continuous-training meetings and direct responsibility for the activities, with attentive support for those who started with less experience or fewer opportunities. - To disseminate European opportunities for mobility, participation and volunteering, especially among young people who were unaware of them or perceived them as distant and not for them. - To involve new stakeholders — schools, associations, institutions — building a more stable bridge between young people and local organisations, in a dialogue where young people could bring their needs and proposals and associations could ask themselves how to become more open and accessible. - To develop and present a petition on introducing non-formal education in schools, as a concrete experience of advocacy and active citizenship, culminating in a discussion with the representatives of the European institutions based in Milan. - To create a structured model of inclusive youth participation, documented in a toolkit replicable by other organisations, youth workers and informal groups wishing to follow a similar path.