We took part alongside six other organisations at Chata pod Lipami, a chalet in the Krkonoše foothills, for Includify, a youth exchange bringing together young people from Czechia, Hungary, Lithuania, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, and Slovakia. Includify was part of Four Links’s Erasmus+ Accreditation, co-funded by the European Union. Before the group tackled inclusion as a shared theme, the opening days asked something more personal: what does each person actually carry into a room like this, and how much of it stays invisible unless someone asks?
That question had a name, the invisible backpack, and it shaped how the rest of the exchange unfolded.
What Everyone Carried In
The invisible backpack asked each participant to name what they brought into the group that nobody could see just by looking: assumptions, habits, things they expected to have to defend. Early in a ten-day exchange, with seven nationalities who had never met, the exercise did something practical: it turned a room of strangers into a room of people who had each already been a little honest with each other.
Where Influence Comes From
Diving into Influences pushed the same idea further into the group’s own communities: what shapes a person’s view of inclusion before they ever join a project like this one. Family, school, the town they grew up in. Participants traced their own answers back to specific places and people, then compared notes across seven starting points that turned out to have very little in common with each other.
By the end, what was left were friends, memories, and experiences that had started to define who each of them was becoming, well beyond the influences they had arrived with.
The Missing Piece
Puzzle Pieces Included gave the more personal work of the earlier days a shared, physical shape: a group task built so that it only worked if every piece, meaning every person, was actually included in solving it. Leave one participant out of the task, even accidentally, and the puzzle simply did not resolve. It was a small, deliberately literal way of proving a point the group had been circling since the first day.
Certificates and What They Confirmed
By the final day, with Youthpass certificates handed out to close the exchange, what each participant carried home was less abstract than it had started out. The invisible backpack each of them had named on day one had a few new things in it: a habit of asking rather than assuming, and a clearer sense of what inclusion actually requires from a group of people who did not choose each other.
Testimonials
You arrive with a suitcase and a few expectations, and you leave with memories you couldn’t have scripted even if you tried.
Photo Gallery
A few more moments from this activity :)
Check these and more photos in the activity’s photo album.
