One Life, Many Ends – the quiet promise behind the acronym O.L.M.E. – is a small-scale Erasmus+ partnership that was born from a simple observation: modern education teaches young people how to start things, but rarely how to finish them. Whether the ending is as ordinary as changing schools or as devastating as losing a parent, adolescents are left to improvise their way through grief, confusion and fear. Over the next eighteen months Italy, North-Macedonia and the Netherlands will pool their experience to create the first comprehensive “End Education” pathway: a blend of psychology, storytelling, digital art and community practice that turns the ability to cope with closure into a teachable, transferable life skill.

The need is visible in every guidance-counsellor office in Europe. UNICEF’s 2021 report already showed nine million teenagers living with diagnosable anxiety or depression, and post-COVID studies reveal that the numbers have not fallen. Social media aggravates the pressure: algorithms reward constant positivity, so when real life presents rupture—romantic break-up, failure at school, the death of a grand-parent—many young people interpret the pain as personal inadequacy rather than a normal human process. Teachers feel helpless, parents feel shut out, and youth-workers have few structured tools beyond referring teenagers to overstretched mental-health services. O.L.M.E. therefore starts from the conviction that prevention is cheaper, kinder and more effective than cure; if adults know how to talk about endings, young people learn that sadness is not pathology and that letting go is a skill, not a talent.

ALMA.THI, a Venetian association that has spent six years delivering death-education and anti-bullying programmes in Italian schools, coordinates the consortium. Its psychologists, pedagogists and spiritual counsellors have seen first-hand how normalising the concept of “finitezza” – everything has its time – reduces risky behaviour from self-harm to gender-based violence. Friends of Education from Skopje brings a ten-year track-record of teacher training and digital-curriculum design across the Balkans; its network of 500 educators will gather field evidence on what Macedonian teenagers actually need when they face loss. Stichting yEUth, a youth-empowerment foundation in the university city of Leiden, adds expertise in online engagement and in reaching the most vulnerable: refugees, LGBTQI+ teenagers and early school-leavers who often experience multiple, compounding endings at once.  Together the three organisations cover formal, non-formal and informal learning spaces, ensuring that the finished product speaks to classrooms, youth centres and WhatsApp groups alike.

The first concrete output will be a forty-page Research Compendium that collects good practices from at least twelve European projects, four in-depth interviews per country and the lived experience of psychologists, social workers and religious communities. Rather than academic theory, the booklet will read like a field manual: how Dutch hospices run grief workshops for fourteen-year-olds; how Macedonian teachers use folk tales to discuss migration-loss; how Italian high-schools stage “living funerals” to rehearse gratitude. An English master version will be translated into Italian, Macedonian and Dutch so that even smaller municipalities with limited translation budgets can use it immediately.

Once the needs are clear, the consortium will build an interactive e-learning platform that hosts three sequential modules. Module 1, “Inner Endings”, helps teenagers recognise physical and emotional changes inside themselves: the end of childhood tastes, the shift in personal values, the first encounter with mortality through a pet’s death. Module 2, “Relational Endings”, tackles friendship break-ups, break-up of romantic relationships, divorce and peer exclusion; it trains empathy, consent, the difference between solitude and loneliness, and the art of apologising or forgiving. Module 3, “Outer Endings”, zooms out to climate anxiety, pandemics, war news and the rapid turnover of consumer goods; it invites learners to craft personal life missions that balance realism with hope. Each module contains short videos, downloadable worksheets, Kahoot-style quizzes and a “digital garden” where participants plant a virtual seed every time they let go of something; by the end of the course the garden visualises their resilience journey. The entire curriculum will be SCORM-compliant so that schools can embed it in Moodle, Google Classroom or Microsoft Teams.

A two-day residential Training of Trainers in Vicenza will prepare twenty-four youth professionals—eight per country—to deliver the course with confidence. Using a learning-by-doing methodology, participants will experience every activity themselves: writing farewell letters they will never send, creating memory boxes from shoe-cartons, role-playing the moment a WhatsApp group is frozen after a classmate’s suicide. A 60-page Workbook, rich in photos, check-lists and QR-codes that link to tutorial videos, will accompany them home and serve as a perpetual reference. The training will also address legal and ethical questions: when is an ending a normal life event and when does it become a safeguarding issue that must be passed to psychologists or social services? After the Italian training each partner will run a local pilot with a minimum of thirty adolescents aged 13-19. The Dutch group will recruit through youth clubs in Leiden and The Hague; the Macedonian cohort will include rural students from the Tikveš region; the Italian pilot will involve secondary schools in Vicenza and immigrant reception centres. Over eight online sessions participants will experiment with journaling, peer-interviews, collaborative Spotify playlists titled “Songs that helped me move on”, and a closed Instagram account where they post pictures of objects they decided to discard. Pre- and post-questionnaires will measure changes in adaptability, self-esteem and help-seeking behaviour; qualitative feedback will refine the final curriculum. Early findings will be discussed in a transnational project meeting held the day after the Italian training, allowing trainers to adjust activities before the pilot phase begins.

Dissemination will never be an after-thought. From month one the Dutch partner will coordinate a communication plan that includes a project website, Instagram reels in four languages, TikTok explainers on “How to survive your first break-up”, and a Europe-wide photo contest titled #MyEndMyBeginning. The climax will be a two-day Multiplier Event in Leiden in spring 2026, bringing together at least sixty youth workers, municipal policy makers, mental-health charities and journalists. Parallel workshops will let participants try the digital garden, fold origami cranes as symbols of release, and listen to TED-style talks delivered by the teenagers who completed the pilots. A final Transnational Partners Meeting will convert the emotional energy into concrete follow-up: joint funding applications, incorporation of End Education into national teacher-training catalogues, and the launch of local “ending cafés” where young people continue the conversation on a monthly basis.

Budget discipline matches the ambition: the 60,000-euro lump sum is split into four coherent blocks—research (9,976 €), curriculum and platform design (21,746 €), training plus pilots (14,190 €) and dissemination (14,088 €). Every euro is justified against the new Erasmus+ guidelines for economy, efficiency and environmental sustainability: train travel is preferred over flights, vegetarian catering is the default, and all printable materials are limited to a maximum of two colours to reduce ink use. Internal monitoring will track not only expenditure but also the carbon footprint of each mobility, feeding into a green report that will be published alongside the educational outputs.

Success will be measured through a balanced set of quantitative and qualitative indicators. Hard numbers include at least twelve best practices documented, ninety teenagers reached, eighty percent positive feedback on the workbook, and twenty external organisations adopting the course within six months of release. Soft indicators encompass increased willingness to talk about loss, reduction of stigma around counselling services, and the emergence of youth-led initiatives such as peer-support groups or school memorial gardens. A final external evaluation, conducted by an independent expert from the University of Padova, will validate the findings and ensure transparency.

Sustainability is woven into the project DNA. The e-learning platform will remain hosted on a Dutch server for at least five years after the grant ends; each partner commits to updating one module per year using their own staff time. Friends of Education will embed End Education in its annual teacher-training fair, reaching an additional 300 educators every spring. yEUth will open a permanent “ending help-desk” in Leiden where young people can drop in for a conversation or be referred to specialised services. ALMA.THI is already negotiating with the Veneto Region to integrate the curriculum into civic education classes, potentially reaching 25,000 students annually. A Creative Commons licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) guarantees that any non-profit organisation can translate, adapt and redistribute the material free of charge, provided they credit the original authors and share improvements under the same terms.

Ultimately O.L.M.E. is more than a set of intellectual outputs; it is an invitation to re-imagine adolescence as a courageous voyage through cycles rather than a linear race to perfection. If we teach young people how to finish well, they will start the next chapter with wisdom, compassion and a deeper respect for both life and death. The consortium warmly invites educators, parents, policy makers and, most importantly, young people themselves to join the experiment, test the tools and co-write a European story where every ending is honoured as the quiet beginning of something yet to come.