RED project (Recognition of Youth Work and volunteering, Empowerment of Young people and Development of Youth Work and volunteering) is a project of 12 months duration coordinated by YUPI organization in Famalicão, Portugal, in close partnership with Germany, Hungary, Romania, Cape Verde, Argentina, Peru and Brazil for a total number of 1700 young people and more then 50 youth workers and indirectly reaching more than 1200 more young people in the 8 countries involved from South Amercia, Africa and Europe. RED aims at contributing to the recognition of Youth Work and Volunteering as tools and instruments for the development of local communities. We privilige different backgrounds, especially suburb areas with difficult access to cultural and social opportunities for youth.Our main goal is to create an international network of partners interested and cooperating for the recognition of youth work and volunteering next to local authorities but also the private sector. We will act at different levels to achieve this goal: International meeting/conference in Portugal where we gatherexperts, youth workers specialists and young people in order to reflect about youth work and volunteering and identify the key elements and the methodologies to promote it (this international conference is takingplace in Braga, the European Youth Capital for 2012); Local Red Action, where young people will have the opportunity to decide and implement local youth initiatives to support the recognition (by society, peers, local authorities and private sector) of youth work and volunteering enriched by the fact that these local actions will be reflected during the international meeting and therefore improved by different ideas; RED @ work, where through jobshadowing on a lonf term basis it is possible to get to know other methodologies, contexts and concepts of youth work and volunteering, taking also the opportunity to have a bilateral learning. This cooperation is reflected also in the idea of creating a network at the final stage of this project that aims at continuing the communication and sharing amon the youth workers and organizations. The transversal research realized during this project under the topic "How does youth work and volunteering contribute for the development of local communities?" will be one of the strong points of this project because besides the local actions abd initiatives implemented by young people, youth workers will also be involved to reflect upon their pratice, observe others' practices and be critical in that analysis in order to obtain results that support the importance of youth work and volunteering in the local community at different dimensions.