World Youth Day (WYD) Lisbon 2023 has challenged all Team Leaders and Volunteers to take WYD to those who will not be able to participate, and has created the Missionary Gesture initiative. The goal is to make all Volunteers missionaries of WYD Lisbon 2023. This will be a visit of all Volunteers, in communion with the Pope, to meet the most vulnerable.

To carry out the Missionary Gesture, the Volunteer Team Leaders were invited to contact and get to know an institution located in the Diocese of Santarem, Setubal or Lisbon. On 27 July, the Team Leaders will, together with their team of Volunteers, visit the institution previously contacted, with the mission of taking the joy of God to the most vulnerable and making WYD Lisbon 2023 a meeting of all for all.

During the visit, these Team Leaders and Volunteers will be able to make known the largest meeting of young people from around the world with the Pope, converse, encourage and pray for all those who come across them. As Pope Francis tells us in his Encyclical Fratelli Tutti, "isolation and closing in on ourselves or on our own interests will never be the way to restore hope and bring about renewal, but it is closeness, the culture of encounter".

In this climate of encounter, the aim is that, after the visit, each Volunteer will bring a bracelet with the name of those they have visited so that in this way, in a symbolic way, they can take them with them to the final Meeting with the Pope.

The Missionary Gesture will visit around 600 institutions which, in total, represent more than 48,000 people. The institutions may be of all types, such as homes for the elderly, drug addiction centres, hospitals, prisons and centres for the disabled.