Volunteers for Cottonera is an informal group of youth who came together with the aim of addressing the needs of children deriving from socially and economically deprived households within the Cottonera area. Our project involved the organisation of an eight-week summer school for children within this area. Moreover children who come from non-deprived households also participated. Through the action 1.2, the grant of € 7,127 was awarded to the informal group of volunteers for Cottonera. This youth initiative involved the organisation of an eight-week summer school for children within this area.This project had two objectives: The first objective was to form a group of youth volunteers (including ourselves) so as to be able to provide a quality service to the young children attending the summer school, whilst providing the youth with an experiential opportunity to exercise their active citizenship through volunteering and civic engagement during summer months. In the preparatory phase of the project, our extended group participated in formal training workshops concerning self-awareness, project management, conflict management and teamwork, amongst others. For the first 3 months volunteers had once to twice monthly meetings, the aim of these meetings was to meet the new volunteers and prepare for the upcoming summer school. Such meetings used to happen at AĊĊESS, Birgu. In July a training week was held, where the group of volunteers was now completely formed. The training equipped all the volunteers with skills needed for the running of the summer school, and for them to be able to work effectively with the children during the summer. The training week took place in two different venues. From Monday to Thursday the training was delivered in Lorenzo Gafá Secondary School in Birgu, which was made available to us by St. Margaret’s College. The training week ended with a week-end live-in which took place at Rivotorto a retreat house in Birkirkara.The second objective of the project was to organise a summer school 'with a difference' for socially and economically deprived children from the Cottonera area. These were children ranging from 4 to 11 years of age. One of the main themes of the summer school was that of intergenerational understanding and solidarity. This was done through the sharing of traditional stories between old and young, and their expression through children's art, acting and creativity. Other themes which were addressed through interactive activities during the summer school which included self-esteem, sharing and teamwork, cultural diversity and the importance of active participation. Intergeneration was the main theme of the summer school, one of the main activities was to prepare a short 10min film about this theme. All the participants of the summer school were involved in this movie. Other activities included; crafts, sports day, water and adventure games and a Maltese day. The summer school occurred in Birgu Primary school, such premise was provided to the volunteers of Cottonera from St. Margaret College.Both informal and non-formal learning methods were applied with the children during the initiative. This experience served as non-formal learning for the youth volunteers as they were engaged in preparing for and implementing the activities that were carried out with the children. All the activities done with the children had a non-formal learning method, the children through crafts, ice breakers and games learned about communication, team work and other important skills. Informal education was present throughout the summer school as many of the children do not have a good role model, many of them looked up to us volunteers and imitated some of our actions. Moreover by seeing interaction between the volunteers and how we related to each other this also taught the children a lot.-------Changes-------One of the main changes from the initial application was the composition of the participants, where some of the participants which were initially listed had to leave the group as they had other commitments such as work or school related work. Furthermore more volunteers joined ‘Volunteers for Cottonera’, since recruitment for volunteers was done during the preparation period. The initial group consisted of 10 participants, in the running of the project due to different commitments 4 (four) dropped out of the project. However, since a recruitment of volunteers started there were 18 new participants. From these 18 volunteers, five (5) dropped from the project and the final number of volunteers from the original list and the new ones, summed up to a total of 19 participants. New volunteers were needed for the running of the summer school. Since we needed to cater for 55 children we needed to be a larger group. One of the volunteers who applied was a French person who unfortunatlly after she completed the training with us she had to withdraw from the project due to personal reasons. The duration of the activities remained the same, however the Activity programme of the sumemr school and training plan were slightly altered. Since new volunteers joined us, there were new and different ideas and therefore the plan of the summer school was slightly changed. Changes were done only to activities planned on day to day basis, such as the inclusion of a sports day, water day and Maltese day. Other changes were done to the training week plan where some ideas from the iniatial plan were dropped the main changes were done to the live-in planning. The new plan included more relevant topics for the running of Kids Point and the short film, moreover it gave more space for team-building and activity planning for the summer school.Alterations to the planning of live-in included the timings of the workshops and some activities which were replaced with more adequate sessions. It was given more importance to the day to day planning, especially in the training week, before the live-in. The week between the training and the begining of the summer school was also utilized as preparation for the activities and crafts for the running of Kids Point.Another addition to the project was the involvement and help given to us from St. Margaret college and the Education Department. This entity supplied us with a co-ordinator, which was in charge of the children discipline and a sports teacher. In fact one of the alterations made to the summer school planning was the addition of a sports day organised by Skola Sajf (The summer school offered by the Education Departement). Other changed to Kids Point programme included extra days for filming. As some filming needed to be done in the afternoon those involved had to be present on different dates. However, in total there were only 4 days added to the scheduled; 3 days were used for filming and 1 day for the sports day.