Create, Connect, Potato responds to a shared concern: many young people struggle to engage creatively, showing shorter attention spans and limited imagination, while creativity—despite its proven value for personal development, learning, and entrepreneurship—remains undervalued in formal and youth work settings. Youth workers across Europe rarely access structured training to foster creativity, especially with young people facing exclusion, low motivation, or media-shaped passivity. Too often creativity is treated as a luxury rather than a core tool for learning, participation, and empowerment. The project addresses the need for fresh, participatory, and flexible methodologies. Young people are immersed in fast, standardised content and have few spaces for genuine expression; meanwhile, traditional youth work struggles to engage diverse groups and adapt to rapid change. We aim to strengthen professionals’ capacity to use creative competences to stimulate personal growth, critical thinking, and civic involvement. The activity is a seven-day residential training (plus two travel days) in the Leipzig area, bringing together 24 youth workers from Greece, Portugal, Malta, Slovakia, Spain, and Germany. It offers an immersive, practice-oriented space to explore arts-based and participatory methods (creative facilitation, visual storytelling, role-play, nature-based learning). Participants co-create adaptable tools and materials and each organisation implements follow-up actions to ensure lasting impact. Main goal: enhance youth workers’ creative competences and equip them with the skills, knowledge, and mindset to promote out-of-the-box thinking and creative self-expression among young people. Needs addressed: limited structured opportunities for creativity training in youth work; narrow or underused arts and participatory tools; overreliance on screen-based or purely verbal methods that exclude non-dominant learning styles; low youth participation due to lack of confidence, resources, or platforms; and fragmented initiatives needing stronger international exchange. Specific objectives: Equip youth workers with creative competences, tools, and methods to foster personal development, problem-solving, participation, and entrepreneurship in youth. Support young people’s creativity as an alternative to passive, media-driven habits and to build critical thinking. Increase organisations’ capacity to promote active participation, initiative, and civic involvement through creative activities. Build a sustainable international network of youth workers, educators, and institutions that advocate for creativity in youth education and grow through cooperation and shared practice. By creating a supportive space for experimentation, Create, Connect, Potato makes creativity more accessible and applicable in everyday youth work, offering a concrete response to disengagement, exclusion, and “creativity deserts,” and seeding a more participatory, expressive, and connected community of youth professionals.