Housing evidence / case study · working draft
The Filter Europe: youth-led workshops and peer education
Young people and youth workers helped create smoking-prevention workshops, then shared them with peers through an ASH Wales-led European partnership.
01 / THE APPROACH
What was tried
The Filter Europe was a two-year Erasmus-funded partnership led by ASH Wales, beginning in September 2015. It brought youth workers and young volunteers together to develop skills and activities for smoking prevention and quitting support.
ASH Wales’ 2015–16 impact report names partners in Austria, Poland, Spain and Romania. It records a meeting of 60 youth workers in Vienna and a July 2016 gathering of 60 young people in Bucharest. These exchanges were intended to help participants develop ideas, volunteering skills and ways of working across cultures.
Young people from Cardiff, Aberystwyth, Colwyn Bay and Merthyr helped create a toolkit of workshops designed for youth workers to use. Participants took the activities back to their communities, extending the project through peer education rather than relying only on the original training events.
The September 2017 showcase account says the workshops had started being delivered and that a free toolkit was available to youth centres and projects in Wales at the time.
ASH Wales’ evaluation archive also describes participants trying toolkit activities, practising how to lead sessions and making campaign materials. Training combined smoking-prevention content with teamwork and intercultural learning.
02 / THE FINDINGS
What was learned
By the Cardiff Bay showcase in September 2017, ASH Wales reported reaching more than 1,100 young people: over 300 youth leaders trained and a further 800 reached through peer education. These are programme-reported participation figures.
The archived evaluation brings together training questionnaires, open-ended feedback, daily learning reflections and organiser accounts. Participants described increased confidence, knowledge and readiness to run local activities. Trying toolkit methods in practice was particularly useful.
Feedback also identified improvements: some sessions were too long or too theoretical, and participants wanted more small-group work, practical activities and examples of using the toolkit. Time constraints meant some methods could not be practised during training.
This provides useful learning about youth involvement and training delivery. It does not demonstrate a reduction in smoking or a verified quit rate.
03 / TRANSFER TO WALES
What Wales could learn
Young people helped create and test materials, then prepared to use them with peers. The evaluation suggests that opportunities to practise, smaller groups and clear examples mattered alongside the information itself.
The delivery lesson is to support young people to run activities confidently and leave enough time to try the methods, rather than relying on long presentations.
Sources & review
ASH Wales, ‘Welsh Teens Stop Smoking Project Reaches a Thousand Young People Across Europe’, 21 September 2017: toolkit creation, Welsh participants, reported youth-leader training and onward reach. ASH Wales Impact Report 2015–16, page 19: September 2015 start, partner countries, Vienna youth-worker meeting and July 2016 Bucharest exchange. Public report: https://ash.wales/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/ash-wales-cymru-impact-report-2015-to-2016-2.pdf#page=20. Sources checked 23 October 2026. This is distinct from The Filter Wales umbrella programme; participation figures are not combined across the two cases. Marker shows the Welsh lead, not every delivery location.
Additional source: ASH Wales project archive, Evaluation final report[1], compiling Filter Europe training evaluations and reflections from 2017. Reviewed 23 October 2026. An anonymised summary of training methods and feedback is shared here with ASH Wales authorisation; the working archive file is held by ASH Wales. Findings concern learning and delivery, not demonstrated smoking cessation. No individual participant quotations or identifiers reproduced.
