"<< Objectives >>Our first goal was to enable 14- to 17-years-old teenagers from Austria and Romania to acquire intercultural experiences in a new environment and to acquire important new competencies. We especially wanted to support young people with fewer opportunities for whom such experiences are not possible without the Erasmus+ funding for various reasons. During this Youth Exchange, our participants should actively deal with the subject of human rights. They should tihnk about how people can live together in our society as good as possible. Our project should raise awareness about human rights, children's rights and gender equality as well as the principles of liberal democracy. To do so, we wanted to use various non-formal learning methods to foster understanding of the ideas behind human rights and liberal democracy. By doing so, we wanted to achieve that the young participants deeply integrate the fundamental values of these concepts in their way of thinking and acting. Eventually, the teenagers should become aware of their own rights and should be encouraged to stand up for these rights. At the same time, they also should understand the rights of their fellow human beings and reflect their own behaviour towards other people. Apart from that, we also hoped that our participants could share the imparted values with their social environment.Another important point was to allow the teenagers to improve their English language skills and to realize how important and useful foreign languages are. We also wanted this project to have a positive influence on the personal development on the young people involved and to raise their self-esteem and self-confidence.Another key goal was to create and strengthen European cross-country-bonds between the participants. They also should think about their own possibilities to participate in social and political matters. It was of high importance for us to make the young people aware of the importance of mutual respect, tolerance and solidarity in a community.But not just the teenagers, also the organizations and individuals organizing this Youth exchange should make important new experiences. Besides the huge potential of improving our capabilities in working in international teams, we also believed that we can get to learn new perspectives by exchanging with our colleagues from abroad. All this should improve our capacity in youth work and allow us to offer even better services and activities for our target groups in the future.<< Implementation >>While we initially (before the pandemic) had planned our project for 15 participants between 14 and 17 years from each country, we reduced this number to 11, as we believe that this number allows us to pay more attention to the individual needs of our participants and to have a better and more productive atmosphere. Many of our participants are disadvantaged due to different reasons (e.g. refugees, minorities, general social disadvantages, low education, ...). At the same time, we also wanted to have some participants that are not disadvantaged to improve the participants possibility of learning from each other. This also has made it much easier for them to communicate despite language barriers.During our Youth Exchange we had one key topic for every day from Monday to Friday (Monday: Getting to know each other, Tuesday: Human rights, Wednesday: Children's rights, Thursday: Women's rights, Friday: Democracy). We have carried out various interative activities about these topics, while we kept the inputs as short as possible, as it was our target to have our discussions mainly based on what is coming from the participants. Most of our methods were realized in mixed groups (Austrian/Romanian), also for allocating the groups we used diverse, playful methods.Besides our content-related activities, we also visited the Vienna city center, had a Selfie-Rallye in the inner city and organized a football match with other teenagers from Vienna in cooperation with the association ""Rettet das Kind"". On Wednesday evening we had a intercultural music- and dance evening, giving every participant the chance to choose one song from their home-country on YouTube and also encouraging the participants to teach each other dances. On the last day, we had a picnic at the Donauinsel.<< Results >>Our project definitely created cross-country bonds between the participants and we will do everything we can to support the participants in staying in touch with their new friends from abroad. The dynamic between the teenagers was even better than expected and we believe that, at least for this small number of young people, we truly managed to build new bridges within Europe.We had participants who already came with remarkable English skills and they had a chance to practice even more. We had participants with a very low level of English and they noticed how easy it is to learn new words while communicating with their colleagues from abroad, stating that during this week they have learned more English than in months at school.Our project has certainly raised awareness about human rights, children's rights and gender equality. Our participants also learned some facts and gathered knowledge about these topics, but our main goal was not to teach them facts and figures, we wanted to impart values and understanding, and these values should have a lasting effect on our participants and their environment.We believe that this Youth Exchange had the intended positive effect on personal development, self-esteem and self-confidence. The participants could also learn a lot about other cultures, reduce prejudices and improve their capabilities to cooperate with people from other countries.We are not naive, our project won't change the world, it won't solve any of the big problems our society faces, but it certainly has changed the world of our participating young people and also of us as organizers and group leaders - and this is what was important for us during this week, a week everybody who has been part of it will never forget."