The Diversity Guardians youth exchange brought together young people from four countries: Sweden, Italy, Georgia and Curacao to engage with cultural diversity in a hands-on, personal and meaningful way. The project grew out of a need all four partner organisations had identified among their young people: they were already living and working in multicultural environments: schools, workplaces, online spaces, but lacked structured, safe and meaningful opportunities to develop the intercultural competences to navigate these environments with confidence and empathy. Everything we did aimed at achieving three core objectives: (1) Facilitate intercultural learning through participatory and youth-led non-formal education methods, meaning participants did not just listen about diversity, they experienced it,explored it and reflected on it together with the help of a facilitator. (2) Challenge stereotypes and build deeper cultural understanding by creating space for honest dialogue, simulation activities and the kind of conversations that rarely happen in everyday life. (3) Promote international networks, active citizenship and a sense of European and global citizenship through collaborative creative work, specifically through the co-creation of the Cultural Recipe Book - BAKE IT HAPPEN, a publicly available project output combining recipes and cultural stories from all four countries. The youth exchange was empowering, provied by the final evaluation report, feedback and follow- up actions by participating youth. Participants ,including those with fewer opportunities, also had real ownership over the programme, contributed directly to its content and left with new skills, new confidence, new cross-border friendships and concrete ideas for how to keep the momentum going in their communities.