Thyme Out: Leaf in the Moment Ten days out of the loop, in an olive grove by the sea.

Ask a group of young people how they are, and a surprising number answer “tired”. Not tired from one late night, but the kind of tired that a weekend does not fix. They are studying and working at the same time, applying for things that ask for experience they have not been allowed to get yet, answering messages at midnight, and doing all of it while keeping up an account of a life that looks relaxed. Rest has quietly become one more thing to be good at, and when it does not work, young people tend to blame themselves rather than the pace they are keeping.

The World Health Organization (ICD-11) describes burn-out as a syndrome resulting from chronic stress that has not been successfully managed, with three parts. Young people recognise all three in themselves long before anyone is paying them a salary: in university, in unpaid internships, in volunteering, in caring for family members, in the constant small work of being available. Because none of that is called a job, nobody calls what happens to them burnout either. So it goes unnamed, and something unnamed is very hard to act on.

There is a second gap next to the first one. Recovery has been sold back to young people as a product: meditation apps with subscriptions, wellness weekends, expensive retreats, courses on rest. The version that costs nothing has been forgotten: going outside, walking without a destination, sitting still somewhere green or blue, using your hands, noticing weather, being bored for twenty minutes. Every young person already has access to some version of it: a park, a hill, a shoreline, a patch of trees behind a supermarket. Access is not the barrier. The habit is, and so is the belief that it counts as doing nothing.

The Commission’s 2023 Communication on a comprehensive approach to mental health puts forward twenty flagship actions and names boosting the mental health of children and young people as one of its aims. In June 2025 the Council of the EU called for greater efforts to protect the mental health of children and teenagers in the digital era. The problem is recognised at the highest level. What is missing at ground level is something ordinary and repeatable that a young person can actually do on a Tuesday.

We are not going to teach young people about stress. We take them out of the loop for ten days and let them find out what they can build with almost nothing.

Then we ask them to turn what worked into something the next group can use.

Erasmus+ priorities. Inclusion and diversity: burnout is not distributed evenly, selection is built to reach those carrying more, and no exercise depends on money, equipment, fitness or experience. Green: one full working day is spent in a landscape that burned in 2021 and is growing back. Digital: the part of digital competence that is usually skipped — safety and wellbeing — tested as an experiment on themselves. Participation: participants write the group agreement, adjust the second half of the programme, write every word of the kit and run their own local activities.

Competences. Personal, social and learning to learn is the core (LifeComp P1 self-regulation, P3 wellbeing, L3 managing learning, S1 empathy). Multilingual, because English is used for something harder than small talk. Citizenship, from comparing how rest, ambition and success are framed in four societies. Entrepreneurship, in the last three days, when an idea becomes an object and then an event. Cultural awareness and expression, in the making. Digital, in the offline experiment and the screen audit.

A seaside campsite in an olive grove, 1 to 10 September 2027: an arrival day, eight working days and a departure day. Accommodation, meals, working space and the sea are on the same site, so nobody travels during the day. Participants sleep in rented tents and mobile homes, which keeps cost and footprint low and puts the group outdoors from the moment it wakes up. Meals are taken at the campsite tavern, open through September. The work happens in a shaded common area under the olive trees, on the beach and on the hillside paths above the village.

Early September in Evia is hot, so days start early, the middle of the day is a long break, and the heavier sessions sit in the morning and late afternoon.

North Evia burned in 2021 and is growing back unevenly, which makes the point about recovery better than any slide.

Running an activity in a campsite rather than a hotel is its own lesson: low-cost accommodation, an outdoor programme, materials that are mostly gathered or reused, and catering built around local seasonal food add up to a mobility with a small footprint and a small budget. Partners who have not worked this way before leave knowing it is possible.

Four organisations each send one group of eight: seven participants and one group leader. Two facilitators from the host team bring the total to 34. Country balance is built into the structure, with exactly the same number of places for every organisation. Participants are between 18 and 26 — the stretch of life where this pressure is concentrated: final years of study, first jobs and unpaid internships, moving out or failing to, doing everything at once with no template for it. Hover or tap a figure.

Selection. Each organisation runs an open call at least three months before the activity, carrying the infopack so applicants know exactly what the week involves, followed by a short online interview. The criterion is motivation and interest in the topic. Previous Erasmus+ experience is explicitly irrelevant, and so are education level, artistic ability and fitness. Each group deliberately mixes participants who are currently struggling with exhaustion and participants who have already found something that works; that mix is where peer learning happens.

Inclusion. Each organisation includes young people facing at least one of the Programme Guide situations: health problems including mental health, economic, geographical and social barriers, and barriers linked to education systems. Participation costs nothing at any point; where someone cannot pay for a ticket and wait for reimbursement, their organisation or the host books it directly, written into the partnership agreement. Gender balance is a stated requirement: no gender above four of the seven participants in a group, tracked while applications are still open.

Group leaders are experienced youth workers or facilitators. What we ask for is someone who can sit with seven young people at the end of a long day, hear that one of them is not doing well, and hold that conversation without trying to fix it or turning it into a diagnosis. They run the daily reflection in their own language and report anything of concern the same evening. All four receive the same briefing from the Serbian partner’s psychologists, whether their organisation is experienced or new.

A deck of around sixty cards in four suits, written entirely by the participants, together with three session designs of different lengths and a short facilitator page on how to open and close a session. It is published as a free print-at-home file with no login, no cost and no registration, so a teacher, youth worker, school counsellor, scout leader or sports coach can download it, print it on ordinary paper and run something the same week.

Our team designs the layout and the visuals so the finished kit looks professional, and does not change the text. That rule holds even where a facilitator would phrase something more neatly, because a card in a young person’s own words is the whole point of the object. A second edition follows once the follow-up reports show which cards work with an audience that was not at the exchange.

The kit and the written methodology go to the Erasmus+ Project Results Platform and are shared through SALTO-YOUTH, under terms allowing free reuse, adaptation and translation. We would rather see the deck turn up in somebody else’s project, in a language we cannot read, than see it sit in an archive with our name on it.

The card texts do not exist yet. They are written in Rovies, in September 2027, by the people who will use them.

Around sixty cards in total; the split between suits is decided by the teams.

Three session designs

• 20 minutes — a teacher at the end of a class opens three cards with the room and gets a conversation that would otherwise take a whole workshop to reach.
• One hour — a youth worker runs a full session with a group of about twenty, with a room or a patch of grass and nothing else.
• Half a day — a whole afternoon from the same deck, the format the participants themselves deliver on Day 9.

It costs nothing to run, needs no specialist training, no software and no venue beyond a room or a patch of grass. An organisation can put it into its regular programme the month after the exchange, and because the cards are made by young people rather than written by a professional, the young people it is used with recognise the voice in them.

Psychological safety rests on arrangements, not on a promise

The week asks people to talk about exhaustion and the parts of their life they are not coping with. Ženski Impuls, whose psychologists work with young people and families, writes the safety and referral protocol before the open call: what a facilitator does when a session goes further than planned, how a distressed participant leaves the room and with whom, who is told in what order, and where the line sits between a hard conversation and a situation that has to stop. All four organisations agree it and it is attached to the partnership agreements.

Physical safety: the ordinary measures, done properly, by the sea in September

A venue and emergency briefing on the first day; a card for every participant with every coordinator’s, facilitator’s and group leader’s number and the nearest health centre; a first-aid-trained facilitator as the named person for health; a vehicle on site at all times; travel insurance and health coverage confirmed in writing by group leaders before departure. Heat: early starts, shade at every outdoor session, refillable bottles, nobody starts a walk without water and a hat. Water: swimming only at agreed times, never alone, never at night, never after alcohol, always with a team member present.

Evaluation at four points, each of which can change something

1. DailyThirty minutes in national groups, in the participants’ own language; brought to the evening debrief and changing the next day’s pacing when needed.
2. Mid-term, Day 6A short form used that same evening. It asks whether the group feels safe enough to be honest — the precondition for everything else.
3. Final, Day 9Youthpass self-assessment plus an anonymous questionnaire mapped onto the four objectives: three early signs named; what the offline experiment changed; practices tried and kept; two confirmed local dates per group.
4. Three months onA follow-up survey on the local activities and on whether participants have kept any of the practices themselves. Outputs tracked alongside: kit published, eight activities, audience reached, downloads and their countries.

Erasmus Youth Quality Standards are the structure, not a reference at the end: written partnership agreements and accession forms signed before implementation; a shared tracker holding the state of every group; deadlines two weeks ahead of the point where a delay would affect anyone; documentation collected as it happens; thresholds that trigger action by a number rather than a feeling; reserve lists of organisations and participants for the parts that can fail.

How to take part

The open call for participants opens after approval, at least three months before the activity, through the channels of all four organisations: schools, universities, vocational centres, youth centres, libraries, sports and hiking clubs, municipal youth desks — and personal invitations from youth workers, teachers and coaches who know someone worth encouraging. Previous Erasmus+ experience is irrelevant. A basic level of English is enough. Participation costs nothing.

• Sapere Aude Greece · GR
• Ženski Impuls · Novi Sad, RS
• The Mindset Society · Będzin, PL
• Bloom Beyond · Ruse, BG