Youth Safeguarding & Autonomy Intern

About Ashoka
Ashoka is the largest global network of leading social entrepreneurs—individuals with new ideas to systemically address the world’s biggest challenges and the entrepreneurial skill to transform those ideas into national, regional, and global social impact. Over 40 years, Ashoka has supported nearly 4,000 social entrepreneurs in more than 90 countries with solutions addressing society’s most pressing issues. Ashoka’s vision is a world in which Everyone is a Changemaker—a society that responds quickly and effectively to challenges, and where everyone has the freedom, confidence, and societal support to address any social problem. A core part of this work is ensuring that young people grow up with the agency, empathy, and real-world experience to shape the world around them.

About the Role
Ashoka is seeking a thoughtful and proactive intern to support our Youth Safeguarding team. This role sits at the intersection of safety, youth agency, and systems change. You will help strengthen how organizations create environments where young people are both supported and trusted to lead.

This is an opportunity to contribute to a growing field that is rethinking what “safe” means in youth-serving spaces. Rather than defaulting to control and restriction, our work centers trust, autonomy, and shared responsibility.

This is what it means to be an Intern at Ashoka: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWDCtlCQkCw.

• Support the design and improvement of Youth Safeguarding and Youth Autonomy trainings, making them more engaging, practical, and aligned with real-world contexts

• Lead updates to Ashoka’s Youth Autonomy Toolkit, working alongside staff and young people to ensure it reflects lived experience and is easy to use

• Conduct research on the insurance landscape affecting youth-serving organizations, including policies, trends, and key actors shaping definitions of risk and safety

• Help identify opportunities to influence the field, including mapping strategies to shift how institutions understand youth agency as a strength rather than a liability

• Engage with young people, educators, and partners to gather insights and test ideas

• Contribute to internal strategy discussions, synthesis documents, and external-facing materials

• You care deeply about young people and believe in their ability to lead and create change

• You are curious about how systems work and motivated to challenge assumptions, especially around risk, safety, and control

• You are a strong researcher and clear writer, able to synthesize complex ideas into actionable insights

• You are comfortable working independently in a remote environment and collaborating across a distributed team

• You bring a thoughtful, reflective approach and are open to learning from young people as co-leaders

• You are driven, well-organized, and detail-oriented while finding fun opportunities to innovate every day

• You have an ability to go deep...into a model, into a field, into an idea

• You are comfortable working in ambiguity. Experience making something ambiguous concrete and actionable

• You have self-motivation and an entrepreneurial ability

• You can work independently in a collaborative, creative environment

• You have a desire to cause systemic change

• Hands-on experience contributing to systems-level change in youth development and safeguarding

• Exposure to Ashoka’s global network and approach to changemaking

• Opportunities to shape tools, trainings, and strategies used by educators and organizations

• Mentorship from a team working at the forefront of youth agency and autonomy

Additional Details

• This is an unpaid internship, however, we are happy to support you in meeting the requisites of school paid internships at your university.

• Must be based in the United States

• Must be able to pass a US background check

• Flexible hours, with an expected commitment of at least 30 hours per week