The project Connecting Youth to Society Learning Circle is a project that focus preliminarily on strenghtening the competences of youth workers to make youth driven change in neighborhoods possible and to restore trust of youth in the society. We address with this problem the need to close the gap between youth and society. Youth in disadvantaged neighborhoods experience discrimination on a regular basis –since many of them have hyphenated identities-, lack opportunities and have a lot of distrust towards the authorities and their country. In order to generate change with the youth themselves at the heart of it, IDEA NL has used the ‘Changing the Neighborhood’ approach in the past, which has been awarded as a ‘best practice’ by Erasmus+. We will use that method to train the participants in this project. Meanwhile the partners will bring in their experience to exchange and to support each other with a spectrum of methodologies to connect youth to society. IDEA NL would like to organize this learning circle as a follow-up on the previous Youth in Action Debate in the neighborhood Europe project 2012-2014, where we brought many of the current partners together in a final exchange. During this exchange the desire was expressed to establish a long term strategic alliance between the partners in order to connect youth to society at all levels. Through this project we will build a European network of international youth workers, youth and academics in order to promote European citizenship, participation in society and youth driven change on the long term. The partner organizations will further develop their international dimension and learn to properly cater to European youth. This project aims to support youth workers and other role models to develop competences and skills that support them to empower disadvantaged young people to feel more connected to society . This new approach, in which youth workers support youth to be the drivers for change, offers innovative experience and unique skills that youth workers and volunteers can show on their curriculum vitae. We also aim to support their professional development, and indirectly, that of the youth they train. By enhancing the participants’ self-esteem, understanding of rights and over-all competences –such as command of foreign languages- which they will use in training disadvantaged youth, we aim to promote youth-driven change in these neighborhoods. The participants will be youth workers from the disadvantaged neighbourhood who are motivated to enhance youth driven change, role models among the youth in the neighbourhood who can drive and inspire others by being ambassadors for change, managers of youth centres and - organisations who want to change their strategies and lastly debate trainers interested in learning to teach disadvantaged youth. The group of participants will be mixed in terms of age, gender and culture. The project will be executed through different activities. It will start with online exchanges where the participants, in their own neighborhoods, share their methods and information with each other and formulate learning questions for themselves. What follows is the training for trainers exchange in February, where there will be seminars on relevant topics, training for trainers about IDEA’s Debate in the Neighborhood method, exchange between the partners and the development of a plan of action. Then the trainers will implement their plan of action and everything they’ve learned in their own neighbourhood, and report on the progress in a reflection paper. Lastly the participants can share experience and reflect on the results, plan future activities and disseminate the results in wider network at a final meeting in Belgium. The participants will, in this project, learn new skills and improve their ability to train youth through debate education, so that those youth will act as agents of change in their own neighbourhood. On a local, regional, national, European and international level the impact will be significant. The participating youth workers and their neighborhoods will inspire and motivate other neighborhoods and their youth centers to use debate education in order to connect youth to society. The regional authorities and policy makers often show interest and will hopefully fund the projects thus contributing to the youth-driven change. On a national scale the position of youth will change permanently through the constant inspiration and motivation the trainers and youth themselves give to others. Step by step youth’s voice will be heard by the authorities. On a European scale the network that the partners and participants formed with a focus on ‘Connecting youth to society’ will sustain after the project, and the sustainable cooperation will help promote youth drive change in Europe. Internationally, IDEA’s partners will be inspired by the approach and could participate in future cooperation.