For the first time since the project's formal launch, all nine Forest4Youth partners gathered in the same room. Representatives travelled from Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, and Luxembourg — bringing together the full breadth of expertise, institutional perspective, and national context that gives Forest4Youth its transnational character.

The host venue, Salle des Frères at CNP Saint-Martin, provided a fitting setting: a specialised psychiatric hospital with a forest on its doorstep, where the project's ambitions are already taking shape through the L'Athanor short-stays programme for adolescents. For many partners, the visit to CNP was also an opportunity to see the project's roots — to understand the clinical context from which Forest4Youth emerged, and the environment in which its first therapeutic pilots are being developed.

Following the Steering Committee, partners moved into the first of two structured workshops — focused on the project's Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) process.

PPI is a cornerstone of Forest4Youth's methodology. From the outset, the project has committed to ensuring that the people most directly affected by its work — adolescents experiencing psychological vulnerabilities and their families — are not merely subjects of research or recipients of interventions, but active contributors to the way those interventions are designed, tested, and refined. This commitment distinguishes Forest4Youth from projects that develop clinical tools in isolation from the communities they are meant to serve.

The workshop provided an opportunity for partners to share progress from their respective national contexts, align on methodology, and work through the practical and ethical dimensions of meaningful involvement with a vulnerable population. Involving adolescents in clinical and research design requires care, specificity, and sustained attention — and the workshop reflected that seriousness.

The discussion drew on each partner's local experience — from clinical settings in Belgium and France to research frameworks in Ireland and community-based approaches in Luxembourg and Germany — building a shared understanding of what effective PPI looks like across very different national and institutional environments.

The afternoon workshop turned to one of the most substantive collaborative challenges of the project: developing a joint strategy for implementing forest-based therapy targeting adolescents aged 12 to 18 using mental health services in North-West Europe.

This is not a question with a single answer. Forest-based therapy takes different forms depending on the clinical context, the forest environment, the professional frameworks of the therapists involved, and the regulatory landscape of each country. What is standard practice in one national context may be entirely novel in another. What is clinically appropriate for a short-stay psychiatric programme may require significant adaptation for an outpatient or community-based setting.

The workshop engaged directly with this complexity — working through the practical conditions under which forest-based sessions can be safely and effectively delivered across the project's diverse pilot sites, and identifying the shared principles that will underpin the joint protocols Forest4Youth is developing. Partners brought their clinical, forestry, research, and policy perspectives to bear on questions of access, safety, therapeutic design, and scalability.

By the end of the session, the partnership had moved closer to a shared operational language — one that will inform the guidelines, training frameworks, and pilot protocols that constitute the project's core outputs over the coming year.

The day closed with something that no workshop or governance session could replicate: a forest immersion session in Le Bois Brûlé — the woodland that lies immediately adjacent to CNP Saint-Martin and forms the natural setting for the L'Athanor programme's therapeutic activities.

For the project's partners, this was the first time the full partnership had walked into the forest together. After a day of structured discussion about clinical protocols, governance frameworks, and strategic alignment, stepping into Le Bois Brûlé offered an immediate, embodied encounter with what the project is ultimately about: the particular quality of attention and presence that forest environments can generate, and the intuitive plausibility of their role in supporting recovery.

There is something clarifying about this kind of experience. It is one thing to read the evidence base for forest-based therapy, or to discuss the clinical conditions under which it can be integrated into psychiatric care. It is another to stand under the trees with colleagues from nine organisations across five countries, and to feel — even briefly — what it is that the project is working to make available to vulnerable young people across North-West Europe.