Project dates: 18 - 26/11/2014 Venue: ASHA Centre, nr. Mitcheldean, Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, United Kingdom The training will be an eight-day residential training activity for young people, volunteers, youth workers and activists of 8 different European organisations. The main focus of this training is on the theatre of communities. Theatre is an exceptional educational method. It provides a unique opportunity of expressing emotions and opinions, as well as presenting issues or cases in order to raise their saliency, provide learning opportunity and immeasurable impact on both the performers (or actors) and the audience. Unconventional theatre methods increase this impact, by associating the performers and the audience in a performance, through an experiential involvement. The universality of theatre tools presents a remarkable prospect for non-formal education and youth work (e.g. the theatre of the oppressed as a tool in youth work). While many international projects express their willingness to apply theatre as their main methodological framework, we, as the core group of the project have discovered that very often they lack the basic understanding of theoretical underpinnings of theatre as such which limits the learning outcomes of participants. Theatre therefore is an exceptional mean of not only reaching out to young people but also to empowering them. We will use a mixture of formal and non-formal methods, as well as the theatre methodology. The key objective of the course is to look forward to the increase of the competencies of participants of the use of theatre methods in work with youth as well as to impact them personally, thus empowering them directly. We will focus on community theatre - an opportunity for every individual to be involved in the performance. As a result we anticipate that the project will enable its participants to obtain the ability to apply theatre as a tool of various activities with young people, addressing issues of particular importance to local communities from which young people come from. The course will involve 27 participants from 9 different EU countries (UK, Spain, Romania, Latvia, Italy, Greece, Poland, Bulgaria and Hungary). They will be youth workers, volunteers or young activists actively involved in local and international work done by their sending organisation.