BACKGROUND/CONTEXTIn the last decades, European policies enabling the European Social Model, supported by EU Structural Funds (ERDF, CF, ESF), managed to increase cohesion among EU countries, whilst internal asymmetries are more and more evident (Giddens, 2006). Young people are at the very center of the process: overall, their mobility-related choices result in a phenomenon known as drain brain, due to the attractivity of urban/metropolitan areas with respect to inner ones in terms of access to services, quality of life and job opportunities. In Portugal, the divide is particularly visible: 70% of the population lives by the coast (0-50km), as made evident by the two metropolitan areas of the nation, Lisbon and Porto, which account together for almost half of the national population (45% of Continental Portugal, around 4.8 million). ANIMAR, fearing how a lack of generational turnover in marginal areas would negatively affect the capacity of the social economy to support local development, is willing to build a cross-sectoral partnership aiming to elaborate a common strategy with international actors who share the same vision.This is an open call for public institutions and private organizations either working with sustainable tourism, job creation, or youth participation and training: local and regional authorities, schools and universities; networks of NGOs and youth organizations; social enterprises and cooperatives; businesses related to tourism and territorial promotion.VISIONLocal development needs time to prove its impacts and must therefore be attractive in order to regenerate its forces: in concrete, we need to create opportunities for young people to stay in low-density areas. The intuition is to take advantage of two trends of the youth contemporary world: on the one hand, young people have been nourishing a new sensibility, proving their willingness to be actors of positive change toward a more sustainable, inclusive and responsible way of living; on the other hand, eased access to mobility is making it one of the most attractive and effective educational and learning tool. As a consequence, we aim to re-imagine mobility from a drain-braining escape to an experience of connection and exchange, promoting the value of solidarity as a driver of our actions and fostering the transition from individualism to cooperation. What we propose as a solution is thus Solidarity Tourism, able to merge the experiential attractivity of mobility with the inner responsibility toward our common home, where nobody is nowhere left behind. Lastly, the internationalization achieved through solidarity tourism will represent an enrichment for local communities in terms of openness and European values, raising awareness on sustainable living and developing EU citizenship. NEEDS AND TARGETThe overall challenge is to elaborate a virtuous and scalable solution able to fight brain drain by exploiting a new kind of mobility: solidarity tourism. Consequently, while the final beneficiary is youth, the target of the project are youth workers, either belonging to the public sector or to social economy organizations. Their need is to elaborate a methodology in order to attract and empower young people with key competences enabling them to engage with their territory. Our proposal focuses on solidarity tourism, meant as an opportunity to create youth commitment and active participation at local level.RESULTS, DISSEMINATION AND IMPACTS