Paid Grassroots Internships 2026: 3 Teams, Anywhere in the World
Update, 10 October 2026: this round has run. Twelve young people in three teams ran their experiments between 28 July and 24 August 2026, and the public showcase is on Friday 23 October. The results are on the Peace Through Prosperity Grassroots Internships page. The 2026 round has closed, and the next round of applications is in December 2026. What follows is the original call, kept as a record.
A ChangeCraft initiative, designed by Kubair Shirazee, in partnership with Peace Through Prosperity.
In summer 2026, three teams anywhere in the world can apply for paid grassroots internships to run a community experiment using the Grassroots Playbook, with $2,350 distributed across selected teams. It’s the first time we’re opening these paid social impact internships globally — and applications are open to anyone with a team and a community.
The Playbook’s motto is plain: no budget required, no permission needed.
Here’s why this matters to me.
What is the Grassroots Playbook?
The Grassroots Playbook is an open-source manual for young leaders to drive social change with zero budget — no institutional gatekeepers, no funder agendas, no permission required. I’ve watched it work in Karachi, Addis Ababa, and Luanda. Now I want to see what happens when teams I’ve never met, in places I’ve never been, take it and run.
The Playbook offers seventeen experiments teams can run in their own communities — covering community connection, peer learning, mental health, environment, dialogue across difference, and campus culture. Pick one. Follow the method. Document what happens.
How the paid grassroots internships work
Assemble your team — three to five people, no more. Pick one of the seventeen experiments from the Playbook. Examples include:
- Community Resource Mapping — turn isolation into collaboration by mapping who has what and who needs what
- Peer Mental Health Circles — safe spaces for sharing struggles and building resilience together
- Digital Inclusion Circles — young people teach digital skills across generations
- Food Security Networks — community gardens and food-sharing networks
- Truth Lab — collective fact-checking and critical thinking sprints
- Respect & Consent Culture Campaign — co-create awareness experiments to shift campus culture
Plus eleven more spanning storytelling, micro-action, skill-sharing, and adaptive reuse. Run your chosen experiment during the round. Document everything as per the Playbook’s definition of done.
No tweaking the method. No skipping the documentation. The whole point is to test whether the Playbook holds up across contexts — and the only way to do that is to follow it.
The budget — and why it’s structured this way
Total pool: $2,350, split fairly across three teams.
- $600 guaranteed to each team — this covers your summer work, no strings beyond completing the experiment.
- $550 distributed across teams based on documentation quality and community impact — measured against the Playbook’s definition of done.
I went back and forth on this. A winner-takes-all prize felt unfair to teams doing brilliant work in harder contexts. A flat split felt like it ignored excellence. This structure does both: everyone gets paid for showing up and shipping, and rigorous teams get rewarded for rigour.
This is a paid grassroots internship, not a competition. Real work. Real pay. Real accountability.
How the money flows (and how we keep it clean)
Because three teams are receiving real money up-front, the paid grassroots internships are built with simple governance to protect everyone — applicants, partners, and the integrity of the work.
- Staged payment, not lump sum. The $600 base is split across four milestone payments tied to the Playbook’s weekly sprints. Hit each milestone, get the next payment.
- Identity verification by video call. Before the first payment, every team joins a 30-minute Zoom kick-off with me. Only the primary contact provides official ID — no one else.
- Public commitment as accountability. Within 48 hours of selection, each team publishes a “we’re doing this” post on LinkedIn tagging ChangeCraft, Peace Through Prosperity, and me. Your work, your community, your name on it.
- Weekly evidence, not weekly meetings. One public LinkedIn or Instagram post per week with a photo and a paragraph on what you tested and learned. That’s it. No bureaucracy, no Zoom check-ins, no progress reports.
Miss two consecutive weekly evidence posts and remaining payments are forfeit. Stated plainly so there are no surprises.
The timeline
- Applications close: 15 July 2026
- Three teams selected and announced: 20 July 2026
- Experiments run: 22 July – 24 August 2026
- Final documentation due: 1 Sept 2026
Apply
Applications for the 2026 round have closed. Bookmark this page for the next round of applications in December 2026.
Who I’m hoping to hear from
These paid grassroots internships are open globally, but I’m actively hoping to see applications from South Asia — Pakistan, India, Bangladesh. From the Middle East — Jordan, Yemen, anywhere the work is needed. From Africa — Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria, Egypt. From South America. From places I haven’t thought to name.
If you’re somewhere I didn’t mention, apply anyway. Grassroots leadership doesn’t have a postcode.
What “documented” means
The paid grassroots internships have a specific definition of done, drawn straight from the Playbook. It’s not a vibe. It’s not a highlight reel. To complete the internship, your team’s documentation must demonstrate all five elements of the Playbook’s success formula:
- Start Small — show how you tested with minimal resources and which small step you took first
- Iterate Fast — week-by-week notes on what you changed, based on real feedback
- Think Systems — evidence you addressed root causes, not just symptoms
- Build Ownership — proof that community members became leaders, not just participants
- Document Impact — concrete numbers and stories: participants engaged, connections made, items diverted, behaviours shifted (whichever success metric your chosen experiment uses)
Final submission requires a written reflection covering all five, plus before/after evidence (photos, participant counts, quotes from community members), and at least three documentation posts shared publicly — LinkedIn, Instagram, or both — during the four weeks.
Follow the Playbook’s process and you’ll have what you need.
Why I’m doing this
I’m running paid grassroots internships, not unpaid volunteer placements, for three reasons. Because the Grassroots Playbook is only as strong as the contexts that test it. Because young people leading change in their own communities deserve to be paid for that work, not asked to volunteer their way into legitimacy. And because the best way to grow an open-source methodology is to put it in more hands and listen hard to what comes back.
Applications for the 2026 round have closed. Show me what’s possible.
— Kubair Shirazee
Kubair Shirazee is the author of the Grassroots Playbook, an open-source manual offering seventeen community experiments for youth-led grassroots change. The 2026 paid grassroots internships are a ChangeCraft initiative in partnership with Peace Through Prosperity. ChangeCraft develops practical frameworks for grassroots leadership and community experimentation. Peace Through Prosperity has been building youth-led social change programmes across eight countries since 2012. The Grassroots Playbook is free to use, whether you’re applying for these internships or not.