Intern – Youth Safeguarding

Job Description

Youth Safeguarding & Autonomy Intern | Ashoka

The Tone:
This is an internship at Ashoka, located remotely within the United States. Ashoka is the largest global network of leading social entrepreneurs, dedicated to creating a world where everyone is a changemaker by addressing the world’s biggest challenges. This role is crucial for strengthening how organizations safely empower young people to lead, contributing to a growing field that rethinks youth safeguarding from control and restriction to trust, autonomy, and shared responsibility.

The TL;DR
• Role: Internship
• Type: Flexible hours, minimum 30 hours per week
• Location: Remote, United States

• Team: Supports the Youth Safeguarding team
• Mission: To strengthen how organizations create environments where young people are both supported and trusted to lead, while rethinking what “safe” means in youth-serving spaces
• Tech Stack:

What You’ll Actually Do
• Training Design: Support the design and improvement of Youth Safeguarding and Youth Autonomy trainings, ensuring they are engaging, practical, and aligned with real-world contexts.
• Toolkit Updates: Lead updates to Ashoka’s Youth Autonomy Toolkit, working with staff and young people to ensure it reflects lived experience and is user-friendly.
• Market Research: Conduct research on the insurance landscape affecting youth-serving organizations, including policies, trends, and key actors shaping definitions of risk and safety.
• Field Influence: Help identify opportunities to influence the field, mapping strategies to shift how institutions understand youth agency as a strength rather than a liability.
• Stakeholder Engagement: Engage with young people, educators, and partners to gather insights and test ideas for youth safeguarding and autonomy initiatives.

The Must-Haves
• Background: Student level, with a deep care for young people and a belief in their ability to lead and create change, and curiosity about systems, challenging assumptions around risk, safety, and control.
• Experience: Comfortable working independently in a remote environment, collaborating across a distributed team, and open to learning from young people as co-leaders. Experience making ambiguous concepts concrete and actionable is required.
• Skills: Strong research abilities, clear writing skills, capacity to synthesize complex ideas into actionable insights, well-organized, detail-oriented, self-motivation, and entrepreneurial ability.
• Bonus: A thoughtful, reflective approach and a desire to cause systemic change.