You for Youth

Volunteer teams supporting the integration of Ukrainian refugees in Romania

You for Youth is a volunteering-based solidarity project in Romania, created around the idea that integration happens more naturally when people are met with openness, shared experiences, and real opportunities to take part in community life. Bringing together young volunteers from Romania, Ukraine, France, and Germany, the project creates a setting in which solidarity becomes something lived day by day, through activities, relationships, and the simple act of being present for one another.

Set in Timis County, in the city of Timișoara, the project grows out of a context shaped by displacement, adaptation, and the need for belonging.

For Ukrainian refugees arriving in Romania, everyday life often means rebuilding routines, confidence, and connection in an unfamiliar place. You for Youth responds to this reality by creating spaces where children and young people can learn, express themselves, meet others, and feel part of a community. At the same time, the volunteers themselves become part of a shared journey, one that is just as much about empathy, responsibility, and growth as it is about support.

Who the project is for

At its heart, the project is centred on Ukrainian refugees living in Romania, especially those who are trying to find their place in a new environment while carrying the uncertainty and disruption caused by war. The activities are shaped around everyday community life, with children, young people, and families at the centre of the experience.

But You for Youth is also very much about the volunteers who give the project its energy and rhythm. Young people from four countries come together in mixed teams, each bringing their own language, background, and perspective into the experience.

Some arrive with direct knowledge of displacement, others with local familiarity, and others with the curiosity and commitment to stand in solidarity from further away. What emerges is not only a support structure, but a shared space in which different experiences meet and begin to make sense together.

What the project wants to achieve

The project is built around a simple but powerful ambition: to make solidarity tangible. Rather than treating integration as something abstract, You for Youth approaches it as something that grows through contact, participation, and trust. The project creates situations in which people can meet naturally, do things together, and gradually build familiarity across languages, cultures, and life experiences.

There is also a strong sense of empowerment running through the whole initiative. The project does not look only at vulnerability, but also at the capacity of people to act, contribute, and support one another. This is especially important for volunteers who may themselves come from difficult backgrounds, and who find in this experience a way to transform uncertainty into action and presence into purpose.

How does it work?

Team volunteering model

You for Youth unfolds through mixed international teams of volunteers who spend around two months together in Romania, living and working side by side. These teams form the living core of the project. Their diversity is part of what gives the experience its meaning: different languages, different histories, and different forms of closeness to the realities of war all come together in one shared effort.

Within this structure, Romanian and Ukrainian volunteers naturally hold an important role. Their knowledge of the language, the local context, and the wider reality surrounding the project often helps create bridges—between volunteers and participants, between cultures, and between intention and understanding. This gives the teams a sense of grounding, helping them stay connected to the real lives and needs of the people they meet.

Typical flow of a volunteering team

Each team experience develops gradually. It begins with preparation and arrival, continues through getting to know one another and the context, and slowly moves into the rhythm of planning, facilitating, and being involved in daily activities. With time, the team becomes more confident, more connected, and more capable of shaping its work in a meaningful way.

That gradual process matters. It allows space for trust to grow, for responsibilities to be shared, and for the volunteers to become more than a group of individuals working in parallel. By the end of the placement, what has formed is usually not just a team, but a small temporary community built around common purpose.

Methods and approach

The project is rooted in non-formal learning and learning through experience. Nothing is built around distance or formality. Instead, the work happens through interaction, participation, creativity, and reflection. Volunteers are not there simply to assist from the outside, but to engage directly, to adapt, and to grow through the relationships and situations they encounter.

A strong part of the approach is the belief that solidarity should be mutual. Even when the project is responding to displacement and vulnerability, it also creates room for agency, dignity, and contribution. Young people are not reduced to their difficulties; they are invited into moments of learning, expression, and connection. In the same way, volunteers are not only helping others—they are also being shaped by the experience, discovering new capacities in themselves and new ways of understanding community.

Project timeline

You for Youth takes place over a longer period of two years, unfolding through repeated cycles of recruitment, preparation, and volunteering missions. This longer timeframe gives the project continuity and allows it to grow through successive teams and ongoing local involvement.

Each volunteering experience in Romania lasts around 60 days. That period is long enough for a real team dynamic to develop and for volunteers to move beyond first impressions into something more rooted, more relational, and more meaningful.

Main activities that the volunteers run

The activities within the project reflect the many ways in which connection can be built. Some are educational, such as language clubs or workshops that encourage reflection and learning. Others are artistic and creative, opening room for expression through painting, ceramics, digital arts, music, or theatre. Some activities are lighter and more social, shaped around sports, play, and simple time spent together.

There are also moments centred more directly on children, especially in spaces where everyday support is needed while parents are at work. Across all these formats, the activities share something essential: they create opportunities for people to meet not through labels or categories, but through doing, speaking, making, and participating together.

Training and Preparation

Before the volunteering missions begin, the project gives strong attention to preparation. This is important because the experience asks for much more than goodwill; it asks for awareness, sensitivity, and the ability to work responsibly in a complex human context.

The preparation process creates room for volunteers to understand the realities linked to war, displacement, trauma, and cultural adaptation, while also exploring themes such as human rights, safeguarding, equality, and support for people at risk. In this way, the project prepares them not only to organise activities, but to enter the experience with care, maturity, and a deeper sense of what solidarity requires.

Practical Support and Benefits

The project is also designed to make volunteering feel sustainable in everyday life. Volunteers are accompanied not only through the activities themselves, but also through the practical and personal dimensions of the experience. Living arrangements, mobility, language support, and mentoring all help create a sense of stability, allowing volunteers to focus on the work, on the relationships they are building, and on their own learning process.

This support matters because it turns volunteering into something more complete: not just a placement, but a lived experience in which personal growth, intercultural exchange, and social engagement are closely connected. Over time, learning becomes visible not only in what volunteers do, but in how they reflect, communicate, and position themselves in relation to others.

Future Opportunities

Although each mission in Romania lasts only a few months, the experience does not necessarily end there. For some volunteers, You for Youth opens the door to a wider path of mobility, engagement, and continued participation in solidarity-based work beyond Romania.

In this sense, the project feels less like a one-time intervention and more like a starting point. It creates a first shared experience of action and belonging, and from there it can grow into further learning, further movement, and a deeper commitment to the values that brought the team together in the first place.

You for Youth is, above all, a project about presence: about showing up for young people whose lives have been disrupted by war, about creating spaces where connection becomes possible again, and about allowing solidarity to take a human form. Through mixed volunteer teams, shared daily life, and community-based activities, it creates a setting where inclusion is not only discussed, but lived.

Project co-funded by the European Union.