Article and news archive

The FIT TO BELONG HANDBOOK: A GUIDE TO BELONG is now available online in 7 languages. The formal and informal learning and teaching materials in this resource are developed to support adolescents to create a sense of value and belonging within their environments and communities. They are aimed to have a long-term impact on social inclusion and are expected to also have a secondary impact on early school leaving or other issues such as bullying.

The Fit2Belong app has been downloaded more than 500 times and is now deployed in Turkey in the Manisa Social Sciences High School, in Poland in the Technikum Informatyki Edukacji Innowacyjnej, in Serbia in the OS Petar Lekovic in Pozega, and finally in the Asociacija Tavo Europa in Lithuania. More than 500 participants in the trials have downloaded the app and are now using it within their school or oirganisation. The Fit2Belong app is a walled garden social media application for adolescents in schools, youth homes and organisations.

The final presentation of the project at ‘’Petar Leković ‘’Primary School was attended by more than 40 participants from several schools and other institutions. The objectives of the project, the activities and their results were presented. Electronic versions of the handbook were distributed to the participants.

Manisa Social Sciences High School organised two multiplier events on 8 December 2022 and 12 December 2022. Their first multiplier event targeted the school administrators from 23 different high schools in the district of their school. In their second multiplier event, they hosted teachers from different schools, lecturers and interns from the university in Manisa (CBU), members of NGOs, nurses, policemen, representatives from local administrations, and people who were either involved or supported the project activities for the past 3,5 years.

Layla Murray has recently earned her Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Goucher College, and received the 2022 Prize for Excellence in Psychology. She wrote an essay for an academic assignment in the seminar for Cognition, Teaching, and Learning, taught by Dr. Jennifer McCabe about the importance of creating a sense of belonging in the classroom in order to increase student engagement and academic performance.

In this article she reflects on her own experience and lists 8 tips for educators looking to enhance belonging in the classroom:

All Fit to Belong partners gathered fin Portugal or the final Transnational Project Meeting, which was held in Almada and organised by our Portugal partners Associação Novo Mundo Azul. During the Final Meeting all partners discussed their partnership, their experiences and contributions in the project and their last responsibilities. After dealing with all projects’ duties there was time to remember funny moments and great memories. The team also visited the foster home in Almada. 

The final presentation of the project at Technikum Informatyki Edukacji Innowacyjnej was attended by more than 30 participants from several schools and other institutions. During the event the objectives of the project, the activities, which were invented throughout the whole process, and their results were presented. Moreover, the school’s pupils and teachers described the process of creating ideas, discussed LTTA meetings in Łódź, Poland, Manisa, Turkey and Exeter, the UK.

Watch the video here: 

In this short video the students from Technikum Informatyki Edukacji Innowacyjnej in Lodz, Poland tell their story about the Fit to Belong project.

Testing the F2B application, we tried to use it as a tool that would support the regular classes, and at the same time encourage students to think about the important topics that we dealt with during this project. Before the class, the teacher would post a question that would be an emotional-psychological introduction to the topic covered in the class, or after the class, he would start a deeper discussion about a question, for which there was no time in the class.

What did I learn in the Fit2Belong Project?

Hi everyone! I'm Damla Nur from Manisa Social Sciences High School and I will write about how our project Fit2Belong affected me.

Jakub Fisiak commented about his stay in Exeter: "Hi everyone, I would like to share my impressions of the Fit2belong project in England. I learned a lot of interesting things. We tested common games and activities. The people were very nice, cultured and interesting.

"I would like to give you my recommendation of the latest Erasmus I was on which took place in England Exeter. One of the most enjoyable parts of the project was going up the hill to a University of Exeter. Also I almost forgot about cooking with teams, which was probably the most uniting people activity where we really met our Erasmus friends. We have cooked the food and then later ate it all together on a big table." Maksymilian Adamiec

My name is Pırıl. I am one of the member of fit to belong team. that makes me feel so proud and happy. Loneliness is hard but overcome loneliness is harder. In fit to belong we worked to overcome loneliness in our age. What we did within the scope of this project really helped some of my friends. I saw my friends improvement and we were the reason of it. That was irreplaceable. This project has made me the person who I am today. Now I feel more confident, more courageous than ever.

Zuzanna Cichosz and Jan Szmyt share their impressions about the Fit 2 Belong project: "At the very beginning, we really like the concept of the whole fit2belong project. We like the fact that it was possible to talk to each participant, not paying attention to language barriers. The activities were interesting, which integrated different people from various countries.

Dr Manuela Barreto presented at the 58th annual Nobel Conference on Mental Health (In)equity and Young People at Gustavus Adolphus College on 29 September 2022. In this presentation Barreto discussed dominant understandings of loneliness and point out their limitations. She defined loneliness, summarised current scholarship about its causes and consequences, and pointed out the individualistic focus of current knowledge, which tends to miss the social context where loneliness often emerges.

Hello, we are the turkish team who joined the exeter mobility! Our names are Akif, Bigem, Damla, Elif, Gökçe and Rabia. We’ll be telling you about our experience in this mobility.

Hi everyone, im Bigem to begin with, from Manisa Social Sciences High School! I will be talking about how F2B Project effected me. So, let’s start!

Hello! I am a student at Manisa Social Sciences High School, my name is Rabia. Being one of the students in the team of the Fit to Belong project is very valuable to me.

The activity which was designed by partners from Portugal the Youth Group Novo Mundo, was tested in Manisa Social Sciences High School. According to the model designed by the Portugal group, we organized a clean-up activity. In order to protect biodiversity, voluntary students from different classes and age groups were brought together.

All partners met during the Transnational Project Meeting in Požega, which was organized by the Serbian partner Petar Leković Primary School. The meeting was full of fruitful discussions about the tested activities, students’ cooperation during testing and their general thoughts of the project. All partners discussed future results and responsibilities.

Hasan Can Kacım from MSBL Manisa High School in Turkey kindly prepared a lovely leaflet summarising all Fit 2 Belong project events so far.  Thank you, Hasan, for this generous support. We are distributing this brochure during the multiplier events. Download the leaflet here

First of all,as you know our aim was reducing to loneliness between the teenagers.I think we achieved this to despite the linguistic and cultural differences with project of Fit to Belong.I am one of the students participating in the mobility too.I joined to mobility in Poland and also I became part of the hosting team in Türkiye with this project.I realised something about between the teenagers in this process.I can say that,no matter what country we’re from,no matter what our language is,when we feel lonely,we all actuall

Another activity, designed by partners from Portugal the Youth Group Novo Mundo, was tested in Manisa Social Sciences High School. Gathering the young people with difficulties in a small group, you can have an interactive meeting in order to guide them where they feel more lost in conjunction. According to the model designed by the Portugal group, we organized a bike festival.

The youngest participants of our project are the students of ‘’Petar Leković’’ Primary School. As younger minors, they have limited abilities  to travel abroad so that they did not attend L TT Activities. Despite this fact, they actively participated in online project activities  – in the hackathon and the eTwinning project. The students prepared a short video presenting our school and country for the LTTA in Poland and a Kahoot quiz played by the present participants at the meeting in Turkey.

Watch the video here: The 2nd Fit2Belong Learning Teaching Training Activity (LTTA) took place in Manisa between 28 February to 4 March 2022 with 48 participants across 6 Fit to Belong countries. Yusuf Kaan Ölmez, Selim Çiçek and Hasan Can Kaçım from Manisa Social Sciences High School made this amazing video from the short clips they took during the mobility. The video is a wonderful souvenir of our enjoyable moments together. 

The Governor of Yunusemre District of Manisa, Attila Kantay, visited Manisa Social Sciences High School on 15 February 2022 with his project team. Fit to belong coordinator İlknur Aktaş had the chance to inform the Governor of our project. The Governor congratulated MSBL for leading the project and he said working on mental health is crucial for schools where the future generations of the country are being raised.

I would like to share my thoughts on the Erasmus project in Poland.  During the two days in which I had the pleasure to participate, various integration games were held.  One of these activities was that we had some time to talk to each participant.  Thanks to this, I was able to meet many interesting people, because I had the opportunity to talk to each of them a little bit.  I still keep in touch with some of them through social media.  In addition, we also had the opportunity to show them our city from the

What is the nature of loneliness and how does it affect individuals and communities? What is the difference between solitude, and loneliness? Why is solitude sought after, and loneliness feared? The COVID-19 pandemic has ravaged communities globally, people have been forced to re-examine what it means to be lonely and to live with loneliness in a way they had not before.

Pandemônio Show, designed by partners from the Portuguese Youth Group Novo Mundo, was tested in Manisa Social Sciences High School as Commemoration Ceremony. This activity consists of bringing together young people to create a performance about commemorating the death of a national hero/heroes, some victims or a national event. In our school we prepared a ceremony to commemorate Atatürk – the founder of Turkey – on the day he passed away.

After more than 20 months and countless online meetings, the Fit2Belong Project Team was happy to finally meet again on 14 and 15 October 2021 in the beautiful city of Vilnius for the second face to face project meeting. The meeting was hosted by the Lithuanian partner TAVO Europe, who facilitated the two-day long meeting where the status of the project was discussed and the way forward for the last year of project work was mapped out.

Therapeutic Groups, an IO2 activity designed by partners from the Portuguese Youth Group Novo Mundo, was tested in Manisa Social Sciences High School. The aim of the activity is contribute to the improvement and acquisition of personal and social skills of the children and young people in care. This type of activity promotes a supportive network in the group.

Another activity ,designed by partners from the Turkish school Manisa Sosial Lisesi, was tested in Petar Leković Primary School. Motivation is very important, both for learning and for all life struggles. According to the model designed by the Turkish students, we encouraged the younger students to think about motivation. They collected motivational messages and then participated in an outdoor game in which they assembled puzzles from parts of motivational messages. "I think we should play this game more often" (5th grade student).

At Petar Leković Primary School, we tried to extend the impact of project activities to the youngest students too. The 2nd and 3rd grade students participated in testing activities designed by students and teachers from Turkey. We have selected activities that can be easily adapted to different ages. We concluded that it was very important to encourage students from the younger grades not only to think about their emotions, but also actions that could develop empathy, supporting social relationships.

The IO2 Peer Learning Activity, designed by partners from the Portuguese Youth Group Novo Mundo, was tested in Manisa Social Sciences High School. This activity consists of bringing together young people to exchange their know-how with each other. Students who are better informed or more capable of certain tasks or subjects show, train and teach their friends how to accomplish them. In return they gain benefits from the cooperation process.

International Literacy Day is celebrated every year with various activities at ‘’Petar Leković’’ Primary School. This year we tested an idea that came from Lithuania - a letter to a secret friend. Students exchanged letters with their secret friends. There were 30 students who wanted to participate in this activity. During this workshop, they practiced writing skills and learned how to send good wishes and encouraging messages to someone. "I couldn't wait to get a letter from my secret friend.

Students of Petar Leković Pimary School and Manisa Social Lisesi started online cooperation in the eTwinning project Fit2Belong. Two more schools from Serbia, one from Turkey and one from Croatia, Poland and the Czech Republic joined the project. It was planned that students from different schools  exchange their experiences, investigate how often loneliness is a problem in their communities, and try to design activities that will better help them fit in.

In this article that was published on Psyche.co Lily Verity and Pamela Qualter from the University of Manchester describe how they found in their research that those who report experiencing loneliness the most are young people, and the common images of solitude people tend to have do not match the experience of loneliness during adolescence and young adulthood. In the article they describe the common experiences that young people mention as reasons for feeling lonely, such as the desire for friends, identity changes, transitions, difficulties at home, etc.

The website Loneliness Across Cultures is an online exhibition about loneliness across cultures.

Fit to Belong team members from Manisa Social Sciences High School (MSBL) were received by the head doctor of the Manisa Mental Hospital. After reading the newspaper article about the loneliness movie "It will not stay dark" that was produced by MSBL, the head doctor of the Manisa Mental Hospital, Dr Cengiz Cengisiz, invited the F2B team members to discuss the possibilities of collaboration. They decided to form a discussion club in MSBL where students will share their opinions about existential problems.

On 21 June 2021 Manisahaberleri, the online newspaper of Manisa, reported on about the "Loneliness" film. Manisa Social Sciences High School students prepared a short film with the theme of "loneliness" during the time they were separated from each other due to the pandemic. The film evokes poetically the idea that loneliness will end with a friend reaching out with love and care. It was created by editing together scenes shot by the students under pandemic conditions.

Difficult childhood (poverty, violence, rejection, incompatibility) is a frequent topic of literary works read at school. We used literary characters to increase students' awareness of the problems that children often face. Immersed in the destinies of literary characters, students think about important topics, develop empathy, look for ways to solve problems.

The etwinning project Fit2Belong ended with the organization of an online conference for the participants. Students presented their work and then, in a joint discussion, participants summarized their impressions about the course and effects of cooperation.

The project flow, all activities and results are presented on the following page: https://sway.office.com/DjdWJGbQcRCBIdV8?ref=Link

One of the activities we organized at Petar Leković Primary School within the Fit to Belong project was a peer workshop. Older students taught younger ones about internet safety and cyberbullying.

Providing a supportive and inclusive school ethos is one of the important factors to prevent loneliness and strengthen belonging among school children.

We organized a quiz for 8th-grade students in our school,  Petar Leković Primary School. Through various games such as word matching, associations, discovering an enigmatic personality, discovering a picture, our students were encouraged to think about important topics.

During lockdown, the students of Manisa Social Sciences High School have created a short film about loneliness. The film shows students reciting poems about loneliness from Turkish Literature. They also act out the speaker of the poems in a relevant environment. As students could not come together during lockdown, each student filmed their own scene separately and these were later combined by the editors of the team.

Students who have learning difficulties can often feel lonely, isolated, and rejected. Peer support may have great power and sometimes gives better results than teacher strategies.

The App team of the Fit to Belong Project has submitted their app introduction video to a competition of innovative technologies, called TeknoFest. In this 2-minute-long video, the team explains that they are developing an app exclusively for the use of a school community. The app is supposed to strengthen the relationships and communication within the school community by making it easier for students to find new friends in a safe environment and to organise activities together.

If you want to discuss an important topic with students in an unobtrusive but interesting way, to interest them in the content and not burden them, the best way is to learn through games. An escape game is a favorite student's activity and it is becoming increasingly popular at schools. Through these games students are actively involved in the learning process, they think, explore, connect and have fun while acquiring new knowledge.

The participants of the Fit 2 Belong eTwinning project conducted a survey in their schools in order  to find out how many of their peers felt lonely, rejected or isolated. Except for the feeling of loneliness, the students investigated what was important to students when they joined a peer group, how much they were accepted by their community and how ready they were  to accept differences, what experiences they have had with peer violence, etc.

A recent review of research suggests that the Covid-19 isolation measures such as school closures, social distancing, and quarantine at home could have a much longer impact on mental health in general and on the wellbeing of young people in particular.

The COVID-19 pandemic is having a huge impact on how young people can interact with each other. Many schools, sports clubs and youth centres are closed as well as exhibitions, cultural centres, theatres, cinemas, cafes, or other places where adolescents like to meet. It will not come as a surprise that young people tell us that their feelings of loneliness have increased compared to before the pandemic. Because loneliness reflects what we think is the quantity and/or the quality of our social relationships. It is normal to feel lonely at times.

This Loneliness and Reconnection guide is a brief, practical guide for parents, teachers and practitioners about what loneliness is and what help can be found.

On 15th of January 2021 Ilknur Aktas, coordinator of the Fit 2 Belong project and teacher at Manisa Social Sciences High School, was invited by the district governor of Manisa to share information about the project and to bring the governor up to date on its progress. At this occasion the governor awarded Ilknur with a certificate of appreciation and he thanked all partners for their diligent contributions. 

Loneliness is a health issue and at this moment even more by the COVID-19 pandemic. Research also in our own Fit2Belong Project has shown consistently that some of the highest levels of loneliness exist among young people, and often during periods of transition like during changes in school levels. In this Culture and Health webinar organised by the University of Exeter in collaboration with the World Health Organisation, three prominent researchers discuss the cultural context of loneliness in young people.

From 23rd till 26th of November 2020 the Fit2Belong gathered virtually to present and discuss first of all the results of the research carried out by the University of Manchester and the University of Exeter with the help of all other partners. The preliminary research results can be viewed in this Spark Page. This presentation and discussion took the largest part of day 1 of the workshop.

In the days before the Fit2Belong Workshop on 23 to 26 November 2020, Professor Pamela Qualter and her colleagues of the University of Manchester prepared a digital background document for all workshop participants, in order to bring them up to date on the progress in the project and more specifically about the outcomes of the research that took place within te project so far. Watch this Spark page to get a comprehensive view on the status of Fit2Belong research at present. 

In this blog post on Psychology Today Manuela Barreto, Ph.D., Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology at the University of Exeter and partner in the Fit2Belong Project tries to bust Seven Myths About Loneliness. Read the full blog post here. In this article worth reading Manuela Barreto describes what people in general are saying about loneliness and what we should say instead.

The Erasmus Days are three dedicated days to learn about the Erasmus+ Programme and talk with the programme’s alumni who will be happy to share their experiences! 15, 16 and 17 October are filled with exhibitions, concerts, contests, seminars, partner networking, open days, distribution of Europass Mobility documents, digital events,… Local events are organized by and for all citizens.Fit to Belong will present the project virtually in a webinar on Friday, 16 October.

Loneliness can have a number of negative effects in the short and long term (poor physical or mental health, poor sleep) and there has been increased demand to introduce interventions that mitigate loneliness, or increase successful management of transitory loneliness, so that individuals are not propelled into chronic, prolonged loneliness.

Based on the large scale research from Professor Qualter of the University of Manchester and her colleagues, the BBC has broadcast a series of podcasts on loneliness and more specifically on ways to feel less lonely. You can find these podcasts called “7 ways to feel less lonely” here. 

The results of the Personality and Individual Differences (PAID) study based on the BBC Loneliness Experiment launched on BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service are published on 26 April 2020. This online survey collected data from almost 55.000 individuals living across 237 countries, islands, and territories.

An article about Loneliness was published in the Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet on 28 July 2020. In the article, the psychiatrist Dr. Agah Aydin discusses modern attitudes towards relationships and the loneliness problem in relation with the pandemic. Despite the general perception that the people got lonelier during the pandemic, Dr. Aydin claims that many people in fact noticed how lonely they were before the pandemic.

Welcome to the website of Fit to Belong, an Erasmus+ funded project where common solutions are identified to help young people manage their loneliness experiences to feel more connected in their communities and schools.

Researchers Manuela Barreto (University of Exeter) and Pamela Qualter (University of Manchester) were interviewed recently on the effect of the lockdown during the Covid-19 Crisis and similar related issues, listen to their expert contributions on BBC and on Facebook:

To find out what the adolescents in partner institutions think about loneliness, we started to do online interviews with them. In each partner country, the interviews are being carried out with 3 boys and 3 girls who volunteered to take part in the research. In the interviews, adolescents are consulted upon their observations of loneliness among their peer groups, 14-15-year-olds.

On 26 April 2020 Manuela Barreto from University of Exeter, Pamela Qualter from University of Manchester (the research partners in our project) and their colleagues published the article “Loneliness around the world: Age, gender, and cultural differences in loneliness” in Personality and Individual Differences. In this article they describe a number of issues that are at the heart of our project namely that younger people reported more loneliness than the middle-aged, men reported more loneliness than women and that age, gender, and culture interacted to predict loneliness.

Following the kick-off meeting in Manchester in January 2020, MSBL Manisa High School students introduced the project by displaying the brochures their teachers brought back from Manchester. For that purpose they set up an information corner in the school, many interested students came by to discover what Fit 2 Belong was about. 

Our project kick-off meeting was held in Manchester on 16-17 January 2020. The meeting was hosted by Prof. Pamela Qualter from Manchester University. The intense day-long meetings involved partner presentations, overall project study, re-planning of the project timeline and discussions on project activities. Future transnational meeting dates were appointed; the tasks to be completed until the next meeting were defined and discussed in detail.

A presentation was held at the Regional Center, an organization responsible for the professional development of teachers from the region of western Serbia, in which, among other international activities, the Fit to Belong project was presented. The goals of the project and planned activities were presented, and the participants were invited to find out about future activities on Petar Leković Primary School website.