Today municipalities are looking for solutions to handle the profound changes in the social and civic landscape as well as activating their citizens in participating projects. Challenges like social integration of migrants, demographic and structural changes are demanding for municipal cooperation, especially in rural areas. The solution to deal with this challenges is an active engagement and participation in society. But most of the active citizens are missing skills and competences in dealing with the social change and engaging in participatory projects.Existing qualification offers are targeting political representatives and representatives of the public administration and are mainly focusing on the development of personal skills. There is a gap to qualify active citizens in developing and implementing participatory projects and managing the change by themselves.“Lebensqualität durch Nähe” is a comprehensive qualification and training program developed and implemented with citizens in order to participate in their community. This LQN process actively encourages people to jointly shape their local community.Through a consistent design of trainings and curricula for professional facilitators and engaged citizens, through a competence check and the implemented trainings in 12 model communities in Austria, Germany and Italy, citizens will be empowered to play an active role in their community and to implement participatory projects by themselves.The LQN process focuses on best practice models, know how transfer and improves the qualification offer for active citizenship through combining methodical competence and practical oriented implementation support.The Project is based on 5 adult educational institutions former expertise on implementing active citizenship in municipalities and the European Association of Adult education.Developed curricula for professional facilitators and engaged citizens will be tested and evaluated in 12 model municipalities. 96 citizens and 12 regional managers will be trained, competence check will be tested 2200 times and integrated in a qualitative and transferable learning offer for engaged citizens, representatives of municipalities and regional managers for active citizenship. The LQN project will lead to more self-responsible implemented participatory projects and to transparently validated competences in civic engagement. The project team plans to transfer and multiply the highly valuable LQN process to municipalities and adult education institutions within their network and throughout Europe.