What belongs in a room, and what belongs on a screen
Call for partners: Erasmus+ KA153 Mobility of Youth Workers, 1 October 2026 deadline
How to join
Two steps, both by 22 September 2026:
- Sign up here: SIGN UP HERE sheet, one row per organisation.
- Upload your Partner Information Form (PIF): Pifs folder, or email it to info@megyesulet.hu.
After you sign up we send you a short questionnaire, about fifteen minutes, whose answers go directly into the application. We contact every signed-up partner after 22 September about the mandate and next steps.
Please note: since 2024 an organisation may be involved in at most five KA153 applications per deadline, applicant and partner together. Please tell us in the sheet how many you are already on for 1 October, so that nobody’s application is put at risk.
Contact: Miklós Tóth, MEGY, info@megyesulet.hu
Where this course stands
Youth organisations were moved online in 2020 and never trained for it. LIVING KNOWLEDGE treats that as a facilitation problem, not a software problem: it trains youth workers to decide what belongs in a room and what belongs on a screen, to lead online groups so that the quiet do not disappear from the decision, and to build a knowledge practice their organisation can actually reuse.
What this course is not. This is not a course about AI, and not a course about digital tools. Tools change every eighteen months; the judgement about where work belongs does not. Participants leave with a facilitation practice and a knowledge practice, of which AI is one bounded chapter, taught with its limits and its disclosure rules.
There are good courses in the field that teach youth workers to produce better digital material: accessible calls, multilingual welcome kits, campaigns that reach young people. This course works in the opposite direction. It works on the organisation’s own internal operation: where the work happens, how it is led when it happens on a screen, and what survives of it afterwards. The unit of change is not the material an organisation sends out. It is the working rhythm the team lives in.
Basic data
| Working title | LIVING KNOWLEDGE |
| Action | Erasmus+ KA153, Mobility of Youth Workers |
| Applicant and coordinator | MEGY (Mindenegyüttmegy Egyesület), Hungary |
| OID | E10276922 |
| Deadline | 1 October 2026 |
| Expected results | December 2026 / January 2027 |
| Activity | One residential training course in Hungary, autumn 2027 |
| Participants | 16 to 20 youth workers in total, including the Hungarian team; 5 working days plus travel days |
| Partners sought | 4 to 5 organisations, 3 to 4 participants each, final places confirmed after sign-up |
1. The need
Youth organisations were moved online in 2020 and never trained for it. Six years later the working environment is permanently hybrid and the method is still missing.
Nobody decided what belongs where. Meetings happen online because it is cheaper, not because the task suits a screen. Conversations that need presence, conflict, trust and slowness get squeezed into an hour-long call. Simple coordination that could have been three messages becomes a meeting that costs eight people an evening. There is no working practice for making that choice, so it is made by habit and by whoever books the calendar.
Online groups are led badly, and that excludes people. In a video grid, participation concentrates fast: the confident speak, the rest turn into names on tiles. Young volunteers, newcomers, people working in a second language, people on a phone or a weak connection quietly disappear from the decision. This is not a technology problem. It is a facilitation problem, and almost no youth worker has been taught the craft.
The knowledge produced is lost immediately. Everything an organisation learns now passes through chat threads, shared drives and recorded calls. It is captured and unusable at the same time. A team learns over five years how to run a volunteer crew, hold a partnership together, talk to a municipality. Then people rotate, and the organisation starts again from nothing while the record of how it was done sits in a folder nobody opens.
AI arrived before the judgement did. Tools that could genuinely solve part of the third problem are now in everyone’s hands, and the sector splits between uncritical adoption and blanket refusal. Neither serves young people. What is missing is the middle: knowing what these tools do well, what they do badly, what must never be given to them, and what has to be disclosed.
These four problems are one problem. Organisations that cannot decide where work happens, cannot run the online half of it well, and cannot hold on to what they learn, stay small, fragile and dependent on a few individuals.
This hits rural and dispersed organisations hardest, and they are the ones with the least access to training. For a youth organisation in a village, online collaboration is not a convenience, it is the only way the team exists at all.
How we know. This need statement is not written from impression. It comes from documented practice: since 2022 the team our trainers belong to has run three consecutive cohorts of a modular community facilitation training in Hungary, including a module on online facilitation, and has collected written participant experience on what actually breaks in online collaboration. Recurring findings from that material include misunderstandings that escalate in writing, decisions lost inside chat threads, the confident becoming more dominant online while the quiet become more silent, and fatigue that turns into conflict. Before submission each partner organisation answers a short structured needs questionnaire, and those answers are built directly into the application and into the course design.
2. Objectives
- Enable youth workers to make and defend a deliberate choice about which parts of their work happen live and which happen online, and to redesign their organisation’s working rhythm accordingly.
- Build practical competence in facilitating online meetings and leading online groups, with explicit attention to who is excluded by default and how to bring them back in.
- Develop a working personal and organisational knowledge practice: capture, process, retrieve, reuse.
- Develop critical and ethical competence in using AI for knowledge processing, including its limits, its risks and disclosure.
- Establish a lasting cooperation network between small and rural youth organisations in Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans and Western Europe.
3. Erasmus+ priorities and EU Youth Goals
Participation in democratic life. Most organisational decisions now happen in online spaces. How those spaces are led determines who actually takes part. Competent online facilitation is democratic infrastructure, not a soft skill. This is the core of the project.
Digital transformation. Approached as practice and judgement rather than tools. Digital competence here means knowing when not to use the digital option.
Inclusion and diversity. Built into the subject itself. The course examines who disappears from an online group and why, and trains the facilitation moves that prevent it. The project prioritises small, rural and under-resourced organisations and regions with weak Erasmus+ participation, especially the Balkans.
Environment and climate. An organisation that knows which meetings genuinely require travel travels less and better. The live and online balance is treated as an ecological question as much as a practical one. Green travel to the course is prioritised and supported.
European Youth Goals addressed: Goal 4 Information and Constructive Dialogue, Goal 6 Moving Rural Youth Forward, Goal 8 Quality Learning, Goal 11 Youth Organisations and European Programmes.
4. The activity
Residential training course, Hungary, 5 working days plus travel days, autumn 2027. 16 to 20 youth workers from 5 to 6 countries, 3 to 4 per partner organisation plus the Hungarian team.
Methods are non-formal throughout: participants work on their own organisation’s real material, not case studies. Screens are used only in tool practice blocks; the rest of the week runs on paper, flipcharts and conversation, which is itself part of the argument.
Each day has a focus and each day produces something printed.
Day 1. MAP. What your organisation knows, where the work actually happens, and where knowledge runs out. The Leaky Bucket: each participant draws their organisation as a bucket, maps its current meeting and digital practice, and marks every hole where knowledge pours in and never comes back. Drawn on paper and exhibited.
Day 2. DECIDE. The live and online question. Which tasks need presence and which do not. The Meeting on Trial: one participant’s real, recurring meeting is put on trial in front of the group, with a defence, a prosecution and a verdict. The reasoning behind the verdicts becomes the criteria of a Live or Online decision guide, drafted collectively and built on tested practice rather than opinion.
Day 3. FACILITATE. Leading online groups: opening and closing, participation patterns, silence, power in a video grid, decision-making at a distance. The Vanishing Squares: a live online session run by rotating participant facilitators while observers track who speaks, who turns into a name on a tile, and what brings people back in. Debriefed immediately. Sociocratic patterns adapted to online settings.
Day 4. PROCESS. Knowledge practice and AI. Turning an organisation’s raw material into something reusable. Guided practice on real documents brought by participants. What Never Leaves the Room: an ethics block in which the group works out, and writes down, what must never be given to a tool, what has to be disclosed, and what each organisation’s own rule will be. Every team leaves with its own Do Not Feed list.
Day 5. SHARE. Building the organisational knowledge base. Each national team designs its local follow-up action. Collective output finalised. Youthpass reflection and closing.
The physical output. Every participant receives a Handbook binder on Day 1 and fills it daily. By the final afternoon each person leaves with a completed digital practice handbook for their own organisation, and the group has produced the shared, printed Live or Online decision guide that all partners keep and can reuse without us.
Participant involvement across all phases. Before: an online preparatory meeting and a pre-task, where each participant brings one real problem from their own organisation, which becomes their working material all week. During: rotating facilitation and timekeeping roles, daily reflection groups in stable mixed-country teams supporting Youthpass preparation. After: a written local follow-up action per national team and a three-month follow-up window agreed at partner level, closed by a final online meeting where teams report what they actually implemented.
A single activity, deliberately. MEGY is coordinating its first youth worker mobility project. One training course, well prepared and properly followed up, matches our capacity and serves partners better than a larger scattered project.
5. Coordinator profile and methodological foundation
MEGY is a Hungarian association working on community building, ecological transition and youth participation in a rural setting. It runs the Gyüttment Festival, the largest Hungarian gathering of ecovillages, intentional communities and ecological initiatives, coordinates European Solidarity Corps volunteering projects, and is a national network member of the Global Ecovillage Network. Its youth work runs continuously, independently of Erasmus+ funding.
The training draws on eight years of building and documenting a dispersed, volunteer-run organisation: its online collaboration, its meeting culture, its knowledge base and its communication. Gyüttment and MEGY appear in the course as worked examples, not as the subject.
The method already exists and has been taught. The trainer team brings a modular community facilitation training that has run in Hungary through three consecutive cohorts since 2022, as a registered adult training programme with ten modules. One of those modules is devoted to online facilitation, and contains the material this course is built on: criteria for which tasks can move online and which cannot, the reasons online work exhausts groups faster, the facilitation moves that keep quieter members inside a decision, the distinction between moderating and facilitating a distributed group, and a worked scale from asynchronous to synchronous channels. Alongside it sits documented participant experience from those cohorts on what actually fails in online collaboration.
LIVING KNOWLEDGE translates that body of practice into English and into international youth work for the first time. This is why the shared decision guide is a realistic deliverable rather than a promise: the substance exists, has been tested with Hungarian practitioners, and needs adaptation rather than invention.
The trainer team combines this practice with certified facilitation work, including sociocratic decision-making, inclusion, and rank and power dynamics in groups.
6. What we are looking for in a partner
Profile: youth organisations, ecovillages, environmental and community NGOs, youth work providers. Small, rural, dispersed and emerging organisations are explicitly prioritised, and organisations whose teams already work mostly online.
Geography: Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans in particular, alongside Western European partners with practice to share.
Commitment:
- sign up in the sheet and send your PIF by 22 September
- answer a short questionnaire before submission, in your own words, which is built into the application
- select and send 3 to 4 youth workers who will use and pass on the learning
- take part in one online preparation meeting and one closing online meeting
- support participants in implementing their local follow-up action within three months
- run at least one local dissemination action
- provide the signed mandate when we send it, with a qualified electronic or handwritten signature
- for participants who need a Schengen visa, select people with existing travel history where possible; visa costs are covered from the grant
7. What partners get
- Travel, board and lodging covered under the Erasmus+ grant, no participation fee
- A completed digital practice handbook per participant, plus the shared printed Live or Online decision guide the organisation keeps and can reuse independently
- Youthpass certificates documenting the competences developed
- Access to a facilitation method tested over three training cohorts, brought into English for the first time
- A concrete follow-up route: partners in this project have first option to join a cooperation partnership developed from the results
- A simple project to be part of: one activity, clear commitments, administration handled by the coordinator
8. Timeline
| When | What |
|---|---|
| By 22 September 2026 | Sign-up, PIF, questionnaire |
| Late September 2026 | Mandates signed and returned |
| 1 October 2026 | Submission |
| December 2026 / January 2027 | Results |
| Spring and summer 2027 | Online preparatory meeting, pre-tasks, visa arrangements |
| Autumn 2027 | Training course |
| Within 3 months of the course | Local follow-up actions, closing online meeting |
| Winter 2027 to spring 2028 | Dissemination, reporting |
9. Contact
Miklós Tóth, MEGY (Mindenegyüttmegy Egyesület), Hungary, info@megyesulet.hu