"The project COMPETENDO – ""Unleashing youth initiative and Involvement through empowerment with key competencies – developing tools and disseminating best practice."" aimed at strengthening the capacities of facilitators in youth education in Europe with sharing tools, methods and best practice how to empower youth by addressing transversal, key competencies in youth empowerment. With our activities we supported the dissemination and promotion of approaches that address key competencies in learner-centered, holistic empowerment concepts. We built bridges between - theoretical dimension, - societal impact (socio-political dimension) - and the concrete working fields of actors in formal and non-formal education (field dimension). Under competencies we understand in a broad sense a ""combination of knowledge, skills and attitudes appropriate to the context"". Our project offered practice, methodology and advice, how to implement ""transversal competencies"" (UNESCO) or ""key competencies"" as EU in 2006 defined for lifelong learning in concrete youth education and empowerment activities.MAIN TOPIC AND ITS ASPECTSWith our activities we offered in the form of outputs, dissemination activities and advocacy measures answers to the challenges: How experts and education concepts need to cross sectoral barriers for empowering individuals better? What experience with key competencies needs to be transferred more precise to facilitators? What innovative materials and outputs need to be developed to promote competency orientation? How facilitators could empower their target groups for facing the challenges of the knowledge society, the social conditions for European youth, and for becoming active democratic European citizens? TARGET GROUPSWith the activities we reached estimated 30.000 European facilitators and experts in the field of youth education from different regions and with diverse backgrounds and working with different educational approaches. Grounding on our expertise we identified these topical fields as focus of our partnership:- General aspects of key competencies and their validation/recognition - Basic assumptions and approach of empowering learning/group processes - Facilitating development of self-responsible initiative: From idea development to the implementation of independent projects and other forms of social innovation or participation.- Facilitating and planning quality experiential and holistic learning- Art, culture & non-formal learning: fostering creativity, holistic expression, socio-cultural impact - European, global, and international dimension of learningKey competencies cover a broad range of skills, knowledge and attitudes- EU describes 8 fields. Therefore, the 5 involved partners from Germany, Austria, Poland and Bulgaria covered a corresponding broad experience between democratic citizenship education, facilitating social innovation and social entrepreneurship, global learning, community mobilization, facilitating cultural expression, digital competencies and cross-sectoral societal dialogue.OUTPUT & IMPACTA central activity of this partnership was establishing the virtual toolbox “Competendo”, available under www.competendo.net. It offers facilitators as experts for civic education and youth empowerment easy to access, free to use content and experience of our organizations and the community. We built on existing experience with virtual tools such as http://getting-involved.net (for the target group of young changemakers in civil society).The ""Facilitator Tool Series"" completes this online toolbox as further outcome of the project. We published 4 high quality handbooks in different formats - print and PDF, .ebook or Flipbooks. The combination of print products, online source and social media presence allowed us to use the strengths of each media. -Steps toward action -Holistic learning -The Everyday Beyond -Creativity HandbookAdditionally, on 6th October 2017 we organised a conference ""Democratic and Diversity Conscious Societies through Innovative Education"". Besides other impulses and the experience gathered throughout the strategic partnership, it served as a basis for the last publication/intellectual output of the project: a set of reflections and recommendations from the project COMPETENDO under the title “INVEST IN CIVIC COMPETENCIES: Why competency centred learning needs more promotion and what policy, school leadership and civil society can do to facilitate better learning conditions for youth in Europe.”.Using the published outputs, multiplier events, the virtual toolbox and our international network activities we connected those that like to share enthusiasm and practice with other facilitators and multipliers. The concept of key competencies was popularized among educational experts and practitioners. The dialogue with the policy level contributed to further European development of youth empowerment policy."