Nordic Youth Peers – What we did and what we learned

Nordic Youth Peers was a small-scale Erasmus+ cooperation project between Traustur Kjarni (Iceland) and Sekasin Gaming / the Finnish Federation of Settlement Houses (Finland), running from September 2024 to December 2025. The project was created to explore how digital youth work and peer support can contribute to the mental and social wellbeing of young people, especially those in vulnerable situations.

Both organisations were motivated to support young people who spend a lot of time online and who may experience loneliness, social isolation, or mental health challenges. The project was based on a shared belief that peer support and safe digital spaces can play an important role in youth welbeing, but also on curiosity about what really works in practice, in different countries and contexts.

What we did

The project focused on learning, capacity building, and testing ideas together. We started with a partners’ meeting in Iceland, where the teams got to know each other, aligned expectations, and planned the activities. This was followed by an online Core Training in Intentional Peer Support (IPS), which gave participants a strong foundation in peer support principles such as mutuality, shared responsibility, and connecting worldviews.

A central part of the project was the seminar offered by Sekaskin Gaming in Finland, combined with study visits. These days were dedicated to digital youth work, online moderation, platform management, and peer support structures. Seeing each other’s work in practice, visiting youth spaces, and having open discussions was one of the strongest parts of the project.

In Iceland, the team created a project website and set up a Discord server with structured channels aimed at supporting safe interaction and wellbeing. Several online events, such as quizzes, were organised to attract young people, supported by wide outreach through youth organisations, gaming communities, schools, posters, and social media. The project concluded with a webinar, where experiences and learning were shared with a wider audience.

What we learned

One of the most important learnings of Nordic Youth Peers is that digital youth work is highly context-dependent. While the idea of creating safe online spaces is relevant and needed, building a new standalone digital community requires a critical mass of users and strong familiarity with the platform. Despite extensive outreach efforts, participation in the Icelandic pilot did not reach the level needed for sustained peer interaction.

This was not experienced as a failure, but as valuable learning. The project clearly showed that young people are more likely to engage in platforms they already know and trust, and that cultural factors, population size, habits, and available resources matter a lot. This insight will strongly influence how both organisations approach digital youth work in the future.

The IPS training was another important learning point. Participants found it meaningful and valuable, but also demanding in terms of length and scheduling. The project helped clarify how peer support training needs to be adapted to online youth communities and different organisational realities. Feedback from the project has already contributed to improvements in later trainings, which was an unexpected and very positive outcome.

What we take forward

Nordic Youth Peers strengthened the cooperation between the partners and built a high level of trust, openness, and shared understanding. Both organisations gained deeper insight into each other’s work and developed a more realistic, reflective approach to digital youth work and peer support.

Even though not all planned outcomes were achieved as originally imagined, the project succeeded in its main purpose: learning together, testing ideas honestly, and building stronger foundations for future work. The results of the project are the activities we carried out, but also the questions we now ask better, the mistakes we will not repeat, and the partnerships we will continue to build on.

Nordic Youth Peers showed that small projects can generate big learning and that sometimes the most valuable results are the ones you did not expect when you started.