In Lisbon, on the 8^th of May the FRIENDS partners met at the Lusófona University Library Auditorium on occasion of the 3° partners meeting in order to commonly review the status of the implementation activities in the countries involved and fining up the strategy for enlarging local and online communities of the FRIENDS initiative.

The welcome before the working session was held from Vice-rector of the Lusófona University, Vice-Dean, Prof. Doutor Carlos Alberto Poiare. After that, the project coordinator Dr. Fabrizio Boldrini gave an overview of the state of the art of the project and main expected results from the meeting.

Then, the current landscape of the Quiet Time programme implementation was provided by each of the national partners responsible of the coordination of FRIENDS project at each country level.

Since more than one year of its start, the Quiet Time programme based on Transcendental Meditation has been implemented in primary, secondary schools and adult education institutions in the 4 countries part of the FRIENDS project namely Belgium, Italy, Portugal and UK.

In order to evaluate the impact and changes brought by the QT/TM programme, a pre-assessment phase has been initially conducted according to specific social inclusion and behavioural indicators among students and teaching staff. Also, students and teacher were trained in order to be prepared for the programme implementation and performing it in a correct way.

The QT/TM programme so started to be adopted by the classrooms of the schools involved and because of that scientific partners namely Universidad do Algarve, Maharishi Foundation – UK and University of Bologna provided an analitycal study based on the empirical data collection. First results were so shared among all partners giving positive feedback on indicators related to the whole school environment and attituted, both for students and teachers. Given the short period of implementation, future perspectives for project development were discussed and agreed by the FRIENDS consortium maximizing the echo reached at each national level and over.

Other partners took stock of the situation related to the deliverable’s development, the completed ones and the one still pending, reviewing also the action plan of the dissemination and exploitation activities, which will allow to expand the FRIENDS communities, the local and online ones, both during and after the project lifetime.

The final session of the meeting was dedicated to sharing the results of the Europe project recommendations and enhancing the FRIENDS partners understanding on how to best build on them for most successful project results.

The working session was closed outlining next steps and saving dates of relevant events foreseen inside the FRIENDS project development.

Be with FRIENDS, in order improve your schools and your future!