Almost all humanitarian organisations provide social support of some kind through lay counselling. However training lay counsellors is often a challenge, as no generic material exists for this purpose. This means that trainers often develop their own training materials specific to their own context with little awareness of best practice across the field of lay counselling. Efforts are duplicated and opportunities are missed to share learning.There is also evidence that there is increasing use of volunteers in bridging social gaps in many European countries (see http://ec.europa.eu/health/ph_determinants/life_style/mental/docs/pact_en.pdf). Lay counselling is a common method preparing volunteers for offering psychosocial support to vulnerable people. Providing training of quality is key to the health and welfare both of beneficiaries and the volunteers seeking to support them. This project targets trainers in humanitarian organisations to further develop their skills and capacity in training staff and volunteers in lay counselling. Through the development of an innovative, generic training material including both guidelines for trainers and guidelines for information components training staff will be enabled to cascade the skills of lay counselling through their respective organisations. As a result both trainers and trainees will gain new vocational skills that can be used to support people in vulnerable situations and for the wider labour market. The project has aimed to look at current practice in lay counselling and, together with a literature review, identified examples of best practice in the field. The learning needs of trainers were also included in this review. This process formed the basis for the production of a generic training material which was pilot tested and evaluated before dissemination. The training material is available in English, French, German and Danish. The consortium responsible for the project - the IFRC Reference Centre for Psychosocial Support at the Danish Red Cross, War Trauma Foundation, the Danish Cancer Society and the University of Innsbruck - has expertise in the field of lay counselling in a wide range of settings, including direct service provision, research and evaluation, volunteer recruitment and support, training and knowledge transfer. They have strong European networks and regularly disseminate their work through direct training, the production of materials and publications for beneficiaries, practitioners and academics. Through this project, trainers in humanitarian organisations all over Europe will have access to new training resources, grounded in sound research methods identifying current best practice. This will allow staff and volunteers to provide lay counselling of high quality to people in vulnerable situations.