Volunteer
Volunteer your Agile skills on a Grassroots Internship
If you coach teams for a living, the same skills work in a community that has no budget, no mandate and no slack. We are looking for Agile, Lean and systems practitioners to mentor the young people running our Grassroots Internship programmes.
This is not a request for donations or for a one-off talk. It is coaching, remote, in small regular commitments, alongside someone who is delivering a real project in their own neighbourhood.
Looking for the internship itself rather than a mentoring role? The Grassroots Internships have their own page, with the projects, the dates and how to apply.
What you would be doing
Mentoring an intern, not running a workshop
Grassroots interns take a community change project from a problem they have named themselves through to something that has actually shipped. They have the method. What they rarely have is someone who has done it before to think out loud with.
Coach a project through
Regular short sessions with one intern or one small team, from framing the problem to reviewing what happened. The method they are working to is our approach: systems thinking, iterative delivery and design thinking, taught in plain language.
Review and pressure-test
Read a project brief before it starts and tell the team what you think will go wrong. Half an hour of experience at the right moment saves a team a month.
Help improve the material
Everything we teach is open under Steal Our Stuff. If you run something and it does not work, we want the correction back.
What it costs you
Two hours a month, remotely
The commitment we ask for is two hours a month, done remotely, over the life of a cohort.
Sessions run in English, and in the participant’s own language wherever a mentor can offer it. That is not a courtesy. A young person explaining a problem in their second language will describe a smaller, tidier problem than the one they actually have. Arabic and Urdu are where the shortage is, but tell us whatever you can coach in.
You do not need to have worked in development or in the countries we run in. You do need to be willing to coach someone whose constraints are nothing like the ones you are used to, and to listen for longer than you talk.
Where this sits
The programmes you would be supporting
The Grassroots Internships grow out of Numu, which takes the same method we use with micro-entrepreneurs to young people running change projects where they live. The projects themselves follow the Grassroots Playbook, seventeen community projects written so a team of three to five can run one with no budget.
What the wider body of work has produced is on the impact page, and how it got here is on our story.
Next step
Register your interest in mentoring
Tell us what you coach, roughly where you are and what languages you can work in, and put Mentoring at the top of your message so it reaches the right person. We will come back to you when a cohort is being matched with mentors, rather than adding you to a list nobody reads.