Grassroots Impact Challenge: youth teams closing the gaps institutions leave

An open call for youth-led teams to run a four-week community experiment and show what they find.

The Grassroots Impact Challenge is the open door to the Grassroots Internships. Any youth-led team can take on a gap that institutions have left in its community, run a four-week experiment using the Grassroots Playbook, report openly each week, and show what it found. The strongest teams are showcased and invited to apply for the next round of funded internships, in December 2026.

Why it exists

Young people are often the first to see what institutions are missing, and the last to be given permission or money to fix it. The Challenge asks teams to organise themselves anyway, with a small experiment, honest evidence and public check-ins. Read What Societal Agility Looks Like for the thinking behind it.

How it works

1. Pick a gap in your community and a framework from the Playbook.
2. Form a team of three to seven people and set up a backlog (a to-do list), a kanban board and a weekly retrospective.
3. Run the experiment for four weeks. Post a weekly update in public and tag the organisers (use #EGCCommunity, #ChangeCraft and #PeaceThroughProsperity).
4. Submit a short pack: the story, the change, the evidence and one human moment.

There is no deadline. Entry is rolling, so submit your pack when your four weeks are done. Make sure you have consent to share photos and stories of the people involved before you post them.

How entries are judged

Every entry is scored on four things: delivery, impact relative to your context, simple and verifiable data, and the quality of your storytelling. The scoring guide is the one source for how points are given, for both the Challenge and the Internships. It rewards teams that changed something, not teams that only proposed it.

Who can take part

Any youth-led team of three to seven people, anywhere. You do not need to have attended a bootcamp, and you do not need to be selected for the Internships first.

What teams get

Recognition and visibility: the strongest teams are featured on LinkedIn or invited to a public show and tell. Every team also gets honest feedback against the scoring guide, and a route into the Grassroots Internships. There are no monthly cash prizes.

If you applied to the Internships and were not selected

Use this page as your open track. The steps are the same, but there is no funding and no required check-ins. Your public posts count as evidence if you apply again in the next round.

What teams have already done

Alumni of the Enabling Grassroots Change Community have run live experiments in Angola, Ethiopia, Türkiye and Pakistan, with no large budgets and no outside mandate. At NED University in Karachi, a student team ran a peer-led data science and programming course with no external instructors and no budget, and enrolled 161 participants in under two months, with students teaching students across every year group.

At SSUET, also in Karachi, a team went door-to-door in their neighbourhood, interviewed residents, and connected a local tutor, a chef and a freelance artist through a WhatsApp group. Within weeks, both the tutor and the chef reached out unprompted to say they had gained new students and orders through the connections the team had made.

These are not pilot programmes or funded initiatives. They are young people acting on what they learned, in communities they already belong to, with the resources already around them.

Frequently asked questions

A ChangeCraft and Peace Through Prosperity initiative, led by Kubair Shirazee.