Artificial intelligence is no longer a distant concept reserved for tech companies and university labs. It is showing up in youth centres, community organisations, and non-formal education spaces across Europe — and youth workers are increasingly expected to navigate it, explain it, and use it responsibly with the young people they support.

But most existing AI training resources are built for corporate or academic audiences. They assume a level of technical fluency that many youth workers simply don’t have — and they rarely address the specific ethical, social and inclusion dimensions that define work with young people, especially those in vulnerable situations.

That is exactly the gap that Building the Future with AI (BFAI) is designed to close.

What is Building the Future with AI?

Building the Future with AI is a two-year Erasmus+ project (KA210-YOU) co-funded by the European Union and developed by a consortium of three organisations: RUA (Portugal), Lascò (Italy) and La Cultora (Spain). Together, they represent a diverse range of non-formal education contexts and youth work traditions across Southern Europe.

The project’s central output is a free, open-access AI Toolkit for Youth Workers — a structured set of training resources designed to help practitioners use artificial intelligence critically, creatively, ethically and inclusively in their everyday work with young people.

The toolkit is not being written by experts and handed down to practitioners. It is being built with them.

A Toolkit Built by Youth Workers, for Youth Workers

At the heart of the BFAI methodology is a commitment to participatory co-design. Rather than producing a finished resource and then testing it, the consortium has chosen to involve real youth work practitioners at every stage of the toolkit’s development.

In the first phase of the project, the consortium conducted field research across the three countries — mapping the current state of AI literacy among youth workers, identifying the barriers to adoption, and understanding the specific needs of practitioners working with young people with fewer opportunities.

That research is now being translated into a draft toolkit structured around six training modules:

• Module 1 — AI Fundamentals for Youth Work: understanding what AI is, how it works, and why it matters for the sector
• Module 2 — AI as a Creative and Educational Tool: practical applications for non-formal learning and creative youth work
• Module 3 — Designing AI-Based Activities for Youth Work: frameworks for integrating AI tools into youth programmes and sessions
• Module 4 — Ethics, Privacy and Critical Thinking: navigating the risks, biases and responsibilities that come with AI use
• Module 5 — Implementation, Evaluation and Impact: measuring what works and building sustainable AI practices in organisations
• Module 6 — AI for Inclusion: tools and approaches for using AI with young people in vulnerable contexts

Co-Creation Laboratories: Where the Toolkit Gets Tested

This spring, each partner organisation is hosting a full-day co-creation laboratory — a structured participatory session bringing together ten local youth work practitioners to critically analyse the draft toolkit and propose concrete revisions.

These are not focus groups or satisfaction surveys. Participants enter the room as co-authors. They read the draft modules with a critical eye, identify what works and what doesn’t reflect their reality, and collectively produce ranked lists of priority changes. Their input will be directly integrated into the final version of the toolkit.

Each laboratory follows the same structure — five phases, from individual reading and reflection to small group deep dives and full plenary prioritisation — ensuring that the outputs from Portugal, Italy and Spain can be compared, synthesised and used to build a stronger, more contextually grounded final resource.

The sessions are deliberately designed to include youth workers with varying levels of digital experience. The toolkit must work for a practitioner who has never opened an AI tool, just as much as for one who uses it daily. This balance is not incidental — it is one of the project’s core design principles.

Why This Matters Now

Europe is at an inflection point when it comes to artificial intelligence in education and social work. Policy frameworks are evolving rapidly, public awareness is growing, and young people themselves are already using AI tools in ways that youth workers are often not equipped to discuss or guide.

At the same time, the non-formal education sector — which reaches some of the most marginalised young people in Europe — risks being left behind in AI conversations dominated by formal schooling and corporate training. Youth workers need practical, accessible, ethically grounded resources that speak to their specific professional context.

Building the Future with AI is one of the first Erasmus+ projects to address this need directly, placing youth work practitioners — not technologists — at the centre of the process.

What Comes Next

Following the co-creation laboratories, the consortium will synthesise findings across all three countries and produce a revised final version of the toolkit. Later in 2025, a transnational training course will bring together youth work practitioners from across the consortium to pilot the complete toolkit in a live training environment, further refining the materials before their public release.

The toolkit will be made freely available at the end of the project, published in Portuguese, Italian and Spanish, and designed for adaptation by youth organisations across Europe.

Building the Future with AI is co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union under grant agreement KA210-YOU-BF18AC1A. The content of this article represents the views of the project partners only and does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Commission.