The Learning Festival or Adult Learners Week, a worldwide initiative from UNESCO, aims to promote lifelong learning and the creation of sustainable local partnerships in the educational field. The Festival focuses on all citizens, regardless their education, living and working conditions. In addition, the campaign has a strong focus on reaching groups who do not easily start of continue an educational pathway by themselves. The Learning Festival wants to create a real Culture of Learning amongst adults, where lifelong learning is obvious for everybody. The Learning Festival is the only public promotion campaign in The Netherlands on lifelong learning. Learn for Life has been involved in the Dutch Learning Festival since 2000 as a co-initiator and since 2012 our organisation is the National Coordinator of this event. From this year we have been building up the project under new financial conditions (without national subsidy) and with the cooperation of a group of enthusiastic volunteers. As a national coordinator we have the possibility to give the Festival a new boost in terms of strategy, content and organisational structure. We are ambitious and we want to innovate the Festival in the coming years in several areas. Based on our previous international contacts and cooperation, we know that we can learn a lot from the expertise gathered in ‘example countries’ that already count with many years of experience with the Adult Learners Week: Ireland, Wales and Slovenia. The national coordinators in these countries (AONTAS, SIAE and NIACE DC) have outstanding experience in the areas we want to learn about during the coming project year, namely - Encouraging businesses and labour & learn offices to take part in the Festival - The use of role models or learning ambassadors during and beyond the Festival Week as part of a strategy to motivate specific target groups to join adult learning and/or to keep learning - Strategies for involving politicians and policymakers in lifelong learning and in the Festival, in order to make lifelong learning and (non-formal) education more visible for them and to put this issue on the political agenda - Offer professional development to educational workers from the local lifelong learning communities through the Festival, for example by offering seminars In this project three groups of four persons each will follow a staff training in the countries mentioned above. The training sessions will take place during the Adult Learners Week in the country, which offers our staff, board members and volunteers who are already working for years for the Festival, an excellent opportunity to learn ‘on the spot’. During three or four full working days our workers will follow an intensive training consisting of study visits, presentations and structured discussions with local and national festival organisers, learning ambassadors, employers, politicians and other stakeholders. During the preparation period, personal learning objectives and organisational targets will be described in a learning agreement. The progress of the whole project will be followed using a monitoring and evaluation document, designed for this occasion. For the participants, the project will provide a rich and varied learning process, in which they obtain concrete knowledge and tools they can use in their daily work. The acquired expertise will lead to innovation of local Learning Festivals and national activities in the coming years: more businesses and labour & learn offices will take part in the Festival, learning ambassadors will play a significant role during and after the Festival, more politicians and policymakers will be involved in the Festival and local educational workers will be able to increase their expertise. Through this project the Learning Festival will get a significant impulse, that will be beneficial to people for whom learning is not obvious. Through this project, Learn for Life also wants to contribute to the implementation of a number of European and national policy goals, namely: new challenges in a changing world and demonstrate that learning not only takes place at school (Europe 2020 Strategy), making lifelong learning and mobility a reality, creating creative and innovative learning surroundings and promote social cohesion, active citizenship and equal rights for everybody (European Agenda for Adult Learning and the Dutch SER document Making Work of Education).