<< Background >>Social practitioners play a crucial role in maintaining the health and wellbeing of vulnerable children, adults, older people, and their caregivers. They have a direct role in improving the lives of vulnerable individuals with complex social, physical and mental needs. Individuals having a profession where they put themselves in the position of encountering negative events will impact various aspects of their lives. In a recent report on the difficulties of the social work profession, job demands included increasing paperwork, unmanageable caseloads, and problems with difficult clients, as well as staff shortages and reduced availability of adequate supervision (Center for Workforce Studies, NASW, 2006). An increasing research base highlights higher levels of stress and burnout among social professionals than other human service occupations (Lloyd et al. 2002; Kim and Stoner 2008). This wider group of social practitioners (including social workers, psychologists, sociologists, and others) are the persons who help people obtain needed resources, facilitate interactions between themselves, their peers and their environments. Working directly with individuals does not come without risks. The emotionally demanding aspects of this profession increase the risk for social workers to experience a high level of stress and burnout. Burnout appears when an individual feels emotionally exhausted, experience depersonalization, lack of interest in work, and has decreased feelings of self-worth (Hombrados-Mendieta & Cosano-Rivas, 2013; 2011; Savaya, 2014; Sprang, Craig, & Clark, 2011). In this context, the project 4LessBurnout seeks to develop the means and resources to assess the level of stress and burnout amongst social practitioners, working directly with vulnerable people, to encourage them to seek for help and to provide them with the necessary resources; meaning training, specialized staff, and knowledge, to manage, reduce and improve their capacity to deal with professional stress and burnout.<< Objectives >>The main project objectives are: To encourage professionals to seek help when they feel overwhelmed; To raise awareness about stress and how burnout syndrome affects people’s life and work; To raise professionals’ capacity to manage stress and burnout contexts and support each other through the intervention processes; To improve the relationship between beneficiaries and social practitioners; To increase the quality of social services<< Implementation >>R1 Mapping the current situation regarding burnout among social professionals by designing an open digital tool for burnout level assessment. This result includes several activities, such as brief research on similar tools-additional to the ones already identified while writing the proposal, 2 focus groups/country with social professionals for the identification of the stressors that will be assessed, the development of the platform and its testing. R2 Building professionals’ capacity to cope with burnout-interactive training. This activity foresees to buildout related learning materials that allows to deliver a blended learning course to promote the development of coping skills that will help social practitioners reduce the stress caused by the working environment to be integrated in the training curricula of the social workers professional development. This activity foresees to build out related learning materials that allow delivering a blended learning course to promote the development of coping skills by social practitioners and thus reduce the stress caused by the working environment. We expect that this course to be integrated into the training curricula of the social workers' professional development. R3 A self-care toolkit and resiliency that will guide professionals to cope with job requirements and the symptoms of stress and burnout. The self-care toolkit and resiliency will be drawn from previous activities, especially from piloting and will contain among other information, practical information on how to use the assessment tool and training to cope with job requirements and the symptoms of stress and burnout.<< Results >>The project aims to reduce the stress level among social practitioners and improve their capacity to deal with the symptoms of burnout through the following results: R1 Mapping the current situation regarding burnout among social professionals by designing an open digital tool for burnout level assessment R2 Building professionals’ capacity to cope with burnout-interactive training. R3 A self-care toolkit and resiliency that will guide professionals to cope with job requirements and the symptoms of stress and burnout. Outcome: 4LessBurnout will enable social professionals to seek help when they feel overwhelmed and consequently will improve the relationship between beneficiaries and social practitioners. They need to maintain their self-care, change up their routine, be selective with the cases they accept and negotiate their responsibilities. Adequate qualification and training lead to better preparation of social practitioners to deal with contemporary situations. It will innovate in terms of providing an online platform that diagnoses the stressors they are dealing with day by day, a set of recommendations and a learning program based on practical exercises, and theoretical information that will be presented on an E-learning platform. Dissemination and Sustainability Plan. It describes the communication objectives: to raise awareness on mental health issues, with focus on burnout, promote mental health at workplace, define the target group, channels, activities to reach the target: social media, events, publications etc. A sustainability plan with specific measures will be built and adapted by partners during the project duration. Foreseen impact: improvement of coping skills, resilience, a higher level of personal accomplishments, release of stress and burnout, all this leading to more qualitative social services and a better connection with the beneficiaries.