Social mediation is emerging in European countries as a new and innovative form of social action and of local and regional development which is tailored to the new social challenges of financial insecurity and poverty, social disaffiliation, difficulties in accessing public amenities and institutions and the risk of ethnic and cultural tensions. This mediation for social inclusion manifests itself in a wide range of practices and phenomena and is a largely unstructured occupational activity. The aim of the project is to develop experience of an immersion-based training method and European mobility on the basis of the great journeyman tradition of the Compagnons du Devoir du Tour de France, which is registered in the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage List. Like the Compagnons, social mediators will consolidate their acquired know-how by means of a period of work experience, which will be spent in a social mediation body in another European country. They will also have to produce a ‘masterpiece’, which will formalise their new apprenticeship. This training will contribute to efforts to build up gradually a European community of professional social-inclusion mediators that cherishes its diversity.The creation of this experimental scheme depends on prior mutual familiarity of the participating trainers and professional social mediators in the consortium, to be achieved by means of an inventory of practices and research studies in the countries represented and on definition of the ways in which the ‘masterpiece’ can be incorporated into the existing or projected certification systems for social-inclusion mediators in each country.The ultimate goal of this experiment is to propose, on the basis of the findings and after having established the institutional and financial feasibility of this system of immersion training and European mobility, that it be made into a permanent and sustainable scheme.