LBO stands for Local Branch Office — RYCO’s presence on the ground in each of its six Contracting Parties: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo*, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia. Where the Head Office sets regional strategy and manages RYCO’s grant and mobility instruments, the LBOs are the part of the organisation that young people, schools and civil society organisations actually meet. Each office is staffed by a Head of Local Branch Office and local programme colleagues who know their own education systems, youth sectors and institutions, and who translate a regional agenda into something that works locally: guiding applicants through open calls, supporting schools taking part in Superschools exchanges, running trainings, and keeping the working relationships with ministries, municipalities and youth organisations that make cross-border cooperation possible in practice.

That local presence is what turns regional programmes into concrete change in individual towns and classrooms. An LBO is close enough to see which schools have never had the chance to send students abroad, which youth organisations need help writing their first application, and which communities carry the heaviest legacy of division — and it can act on that. The result is impact measured in specifics rather than headlines: a teacher in a small municipality who now runs an exchange every year, a first-time grantee whose project outlives its funding, a group of students who meet peers from across a border for the first time. The stories on this page come directly from those six offices, and together they show what regional cooperation looks like when it happens street by street, school by school.