The fact that young people with autism are left behind both in social life and in educational settings is something we all more or less know, but it often becomes “normalised” and invisible. When we designed this project, we wanted to break exactly this invisibility, to put really useful and applicable tools into the hands of youth workers, and to create spaces where young people with autism can feel safer, more understood, and more included. We noticed that many youth workers have good intentions but incomplete knowledge about autism; they are theoretically “aware,” but they do not really know how to adapt a concrete activity, how to respond in a meltdown situation, or how to support emotional regulation. This creates a cycle that is difficult for both the youth worker and the young person with autism. In our discussions with partners from Türkiye, Greece, Germany, Latvia, Portugal, Romania, Estonia, Morocco and Ukraine, we heard very similar things: young people with autism want to participate in various youth projects, but when the environments are not sufficiently adapted for them, they either drop out early or do not apply at all. Organisations say they care about inclusion, but there is a very clear lack of autism-focused structured programmes, concrete tools, and trained teams. Especially in the fields of emotional regulation, social interaction, and communication, there were obvious gaps. This showed us that instead of only talking about “awareness,” there is a need for a project that shows youth workers how to do things in practice – supported with hands-on content such as breathing exercises, mindfulness, yoga, sensorimotor activities, and vagus-nerve-based relaxation techniques. Another important point in the background of the project is that the social isolation experienced by young people with autism is not just an individual difficulty, but also a structural issue. The education system, employment settings, and youth spaces are mostly designed for “neurotypical” young people. In the feedback our partners received from families and professionals working with young people with autism, we kept hearing the same sentence in different languages: “There is good will in youth work, but there is no method.” For this reason, we created a 7+1 day intensive programme in Ankara that would both explain autism from a neurodiversity perspective and offer workshops that youth workers can directly apply when they return to their local contexts. The day-by-day programme we detailed in Excel was shaped exactly according to this need: from icebreakers that build a safe space, to mindfulness journals, from sensory-based breaks to vagus nerve exercises, from cultural evenings to action planning and booklet preparation, we designed an end-to-end flow. Another motivation in the background was to bring together the experience that already existed among partner organisations but was dispersed. Some of us work in environment-focused youth projects, some in the field of human rights, and some in education centres with young people who have learning difficulties; but all of us had a common ground where we were in contact with young people with autism. We designed this project also to gather that scattered experience and to create a common language and approach under the title “Pathways to Success for Youth with Autism.” In this way, we aimed both to increase the capacity of our own organisations and, in the long term, to build a stronger international network for autism-focused youth projects.