Before any residency begins, the nine selected artists — three from Germany, three from Greece, three from Romania, working in music, design, and theatre and scenic movement — come together for a period of online training and team-building.

It starts with a two-day online team-building, designed simply to help nine strangers become a working team. From there, the artists move into a structured training on participatory and co-creation methods. By the end of this phase, every artist shares the same toolkit and the same understanding of what the residencies are meant to achieve, regardless of their discipline or home country.

In each host city, around 50 young people aged 15–30 are recruited and organised into three smaller groups. Before the artists ever set foot in the country, two blended preparatory meetings bring these groups together with local facilitators in person, and with the international artists online.

These early conversations matter. They introduce the NEB value at the heart of that residency, surface the community’s own experiences and concerns, and start building the trust that co-creation depends on — so that by the time the artists arrive, it isn’t nine strangers meeting fifty more, but a team that has already started talking.