The HEROES project, funded by the EAHC (European Commission Executive Agency for Health and Consumers), will start its pilot study and pilot implementation on the youth field in 11 European Member States (Belgium, France, Bulgaria, Poland, Spain, Greece, Luxembourg, Portugal, Germany, Cyprus and The Netherlands). In several recreational settings, young people will be soon able to meet the HEROES project volunteers, students and peer educators testing new awareness-raising tools and campaigns, cross-fertilizing 2 different health and road safety topics, in order to reach a bigger crowd who might often be more interested in only one topic but yet sensitized on both.

On the 2nd, 3rd and 4th of September 2009, the second meeting of the transnational cooperation in the project "HEROES" was held in Cyprus. It mainly focused on the strict selection of the best European practices on road safety, AIDS, drugs and alcohol prevention, collected during the first year of the project. The 13 organizations / universities / research institutes involved in the project and coming from 11 countries of the European Union, have successfully determined 13 new awareness health and road safety cross-fertilized campaigns to be tested amongst youngsters.

This project stretched on 3 years has been created to exchange working methods and best practices awareness for teenagers and young adults. It will also allow the development of a virtual network of volunteers, students and educators across Europe.
Each partner of the project will from now on create new awareness campaigns in their home country, based on best practices and matching health and road safety. HEROES will test and study their implementation and training possibilities for volunteers, students and peer educators, taking into account wider socio-economic considerations and will contribute reducing inequalities in health in Europe, within the framework of the European Road Safety Charter, urging Member States to reduce by 50% the number and the seriousness of road accidents by 2010.

Therefore, a HEROES website (www.ryd.eu/heroes) was created, bringing together the best practices selected by all participants. This site can be used by all NGO’s active in the different analyzed areas during the project (health and road safety) to help developing new awareness campaigns at national or local level.
13 new potential cross-fertilized campaigns have already been determined whose guidelines and analyses will be soon available on the website. These new campaigns, inspired by successful experiences, will help to simultaneously educating young people on several issues. 

The intermediate meeting of the project was held in Cyprus in order to select the best practices among those selected. It was also the opportunity for all project partners to define the guidelines for the creation of these 13 new Peer to Peer awareness approaches targeting youngsters, as well as to determine the training that will be given to young European volunteers participating in the project. During their awareness campaigns, those youngsters will be considered as heroes using high quality campaigns from all over Europe and linking health and road safety. After the pilot projects, useful guidelines, from the creation till the implementation of a new campaign will be available on the HEROES website in order to help other associations active in the field of health and road safety creating new awareness campaigns.

Teenagers and young adults will receive the message that responsible and mature attitude, they often want to prove to their friends, is an attitude where the responsibility is placed in different areas such as love (HIV / AIDS), health (alcohol, drugs) and road safety.