Peacebuilding Youth Design Challenge

What could make your school or community more peaceful? Pick a theme, design a real idea to create change, and enter into the national competition for a chance to receive seed funding and mentoring to take the idea further. Open to ages 10 to 21.

Get started as a student

Get started as an educator or parent

Free worksheets, slides, certificates and curriculum links are available for educators to run the challenge · No experience needed to get started

Open now · Submissions from March – November 2026

PROUDLY SUPPORTED BY

Help young people in your region become peacebuilders. If you're involved in an Australian Rotary Club you can join the challenge or bring it to a local school. Express your interest here below.

Click here to complete a Rotary Club expression of interest

What's the Peacebuilding Challenge all about?

Australia is home to hundreds of cultures, languages, and stories. From remote communities to fast-growing regional centres and bustling cities, young people across the country are navigating a world shaped by diversity, digital change, and the need for empathy and understanding.

Every day, young Australians experience the impact of conflict, whether it’s misunderstandings between cultural groups, bullying at school, misinformation online, or the tensions created by history that hasn’t been fully told. At the same time, they are powerful agents of peace: creative thinkers, bridge-builders, storytellers, upstanders, and innovators.

But Australia still faces challenges that stand in the way of more peaceful and connected communities:

1 in 3 students experiences bullying during their school years (eSafety Commission, 2023).
Racism and prejudice remain common, with almost half of young Australians reporting they’ve seen someone treated unfairly because of their background (Scanlon Foundation, 2023).
Online conflict is rising, with digital misunderstandings and cyber-harm becoming more frequent for young people.
Many students want to learn more about First Nations histories and cultures, but lack opportunities for truth-telling, connection, and collaboration.
Young people overwhelmingly say they want safer, kinder spaces both online and offline where everyone feels included.

Despite these challenges, young Australians are resilient, creative, and ready to make change. They know that peace isn’t just the absence of conflict; it’s the presence of understanding, fairness, connection, and respect.

We’re challenging young people aged 10-21 across Australia to participate in the Peacebuilding National Youth Design Challenge from March to November 2026.

This challenge is an opportunity to use creativity, innovation, and empathy to design solutions for a more peaceful world.

Your task is to explore the barriers that prevent peace and connection in your school, community, or the digital spaces you use and design a solution that helps create a more supportive, respectful, and inclusive environment for young people.

Choose the theme that speaks to you:

Bridging Cultural Divides: How might we reduce racism or prejudice in our school or community by promoting empathy and positive interaction?
Emotional Resilience & Conflict Skills: How might we create new ways for students to resolve conflict or prevent bullying in safe, respectful, and empowering ways?
Peace Through Art & Storytelling: How might we design a creative project that inspires others to take positive action toward a more peaceful community?
Reconciliation: How might we support truth-telling and strengthen relationships between First Nations and non-Indigenous young people?
Digital Peacebuilding: How might we design tools, spaces, or systems that make the digital world safer, more inclusive, and more supportive for young people?

Seed funding, prizes and judges will be announced soon!

We're lining up seed funding for the winning ideas and an inspiring judging panel. Register now to be the first to hear about these updates and get started on your ideas.

Key Dates

6th November 2026 – Final idea submissions due
10th - 13th November 2026 - Finalists announced
18th November 2026 - Virtual showcase event & winners announced
23rd November - 11th December - Virtual mentoring sessions for the winning teams

Judges

Dr Tania Miletic

Co Director, Initiative for Peacebuilding
Faculty of Arts, The University of Melbourne

Tania Miletic is Co-Director of the Initiative for Peacebuilding at the University of Melbourne. She leads research and policy innovation on conflict prevention and peacebuilding across Australia and the Asia‑Pacific, drawing on two decades of work across Southeast Asia, China and the Pacific. Tania builds partnerships that amplify locally grounded knowledge and advance inclusive, transformative peace processes with governments and community partners.

Charlie Allen APM (Australian Police Medal)

Director of Partnerships at the Institute for Economics and Peace

Charlie Allen APM is a highly respected peacebuilding, resilience and leadership professional with more than 30 years’ experience, including 35 years with Victoria Police. Known for his community-centred approach, Charlie has spent the past decade expanding his peacebuilding practice across Asia, Africa, the MENA region and Oceania.
Charlie holds a Master’s in Leadership and Organisational Change, alongside postgraduate studies in Peace and Conflict Prevention, Good Governance and Human Rights. As former Director of Partnerships at the Institute for Economics and Peace, he facilitated Positive Peace workshops with partners around the world.

Satara Uthayakumaran

ABC’s Youth Advisory Council & Australia’s Youth Representative to the United Nations for 2025

Satara Uthayakumaran is an advocate, dedicated to legal and social reform, and was Australia’s Youth Representative to the United Nations for 2025. She serves on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Youth Advisory Council, was previously a National Youth Advisor for Amnesty International, and has worked with the Australian Human Rights Commission. She frequently appears on the ABC and writes for the SBS, Sydney Morning Herald and The Guardian. Satara worked as a Policy Advisor at the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, and is currently completing her Bachelor of Arts/Law at ANU.

For Youth

Aged 10–21? Pick a theme, design your idea, and submit it for the chance to receive seed funding to make it real.

For Educators

Run the challenge with your class. Get free worksheets, slides, curriculum links and join an upcoming free PD session.

Join an upcoming PD for the challenge here.

For Parents (of Under 18 Entrants)

A hands-on activity that builds your child's confidence, resilience and entrepreneurial mindset at home. All resources provided.

Join the challenge today

FAQs

The Peacebuilding National Youth Design Challenge is a free online design thinking challenge that empowers youth to consider how they can create more peaceful schools, communities and/or digital spaces. It empowers youth to identify problems, reframe them as opportunities, develop solutions, and create prototypes. Young people aged 10-21 will also be able to enter the challenge and be in the draw to win prizes to help them develop their ideas further.

There are two entry categories:

Junior Category: 10-13-year-olds (2 winners will be chosen)
Senior Category: 14-21-year-olds (2 winners will be chosen)

The top 20 ideas will be shortlisted and taken to our judging panel. Winning ideas will be selected from the pool of the top 20 finalist ideas.

Our judging panel will choose two winners from each category.

Entries must be submitted by 6th November, 2026. Finalists will be announced and a showcase will be held virtually to announce the winners on the 18th of November.

Youth: You can do this challenge independently, with a friend, in a team, or with your siblings! Just download the resources, do the challenge, and submit a project page!

Educators & Parents: If you'd like your students or children to participate in this challenge, please download the resources via the signup form. You will receive access to all of the resources you need to run the challenge with your students or children. You can submit a project page on behalf of your students or children, or they can do it themselves. Instructions for entering the challenge can be found in the resources.

All challenge entries must be submitted by the challenge close date.

How the challenge works

You want to start by deep diving into the challenge you’ve chosen. You may want to look at some of the additional resources to get a better understanding of the topic you’ve chosen.

Then, it’s time to find someone you can interview about the challenge. These interviews are known as “empathy interviews” as you start to learn more about the problem by empathising with the person you are interviewing and understanding some of the challenges they face.

So, find a partner and ask them to tell you about this problem and how it affects them. We have sample questions for each of the chosen themes but please feel free to ask your own as well.

For example: If you are the 'Reconcilliation' theme, you might ask your partner the following questions:

When you hear the word “reconciliation,” what does it mean to you personally?
What helps you feel grounded or connected to place, Country, or community?
Has a truth-telling activity (film, talk, book, artwork, lesson) ever shifted your perspective?

Make sure to dig deeper as your partner answers by asking “why”!

To create a solution that will have a positive impact you need to think about who is being affected by the problem. Whilst we are all impacted by issues in the long run it’s important to be specific. Is it young people like you? Is it children in primary school? Maybe it's young adults? Try and figure out who you want to help!

Make sure you take plenty of notes as you interview your partner. Keep your notes from these interviews and it will be useful for the customer/user section of your submission!

From your empathy interviews, you will get interesting insights about some problems this person might have in helping to be part of the solution. Take a look through your notes and circle all of the problems or challenges you found in your empathy interviews.

Now pick the most important one. This problem should also feel exciting for you to solve.

For example:

"Jackie wants to give back to a charity, but doesn't know how or which one to choose!"
Cause: Jackie is overwhelmed by the amount of charities she can support.

Now that you have identified the problem you are going to solve, it’s time to reframe that as an opportunity.

We want to reframe this so that we’re not thinking about this as a negative but rather, as an opportunity to be creative and innovative problem solvers! We do this by using a simple tool called a “How Might We” statement.

The trick with How Might We statements is to ensure they don’t include the solution in them. This limits our thinking.

For example, if we pick one of the causes of Jackie's problem:
“Jackie wants to give back to a charity, but doesn't know how or which one to choose!”

The question might become:
"How might we make it easier for Jackie to find information on charities that align with her values?"

Now you have your opportunity, it is time to be creative and come up with ideas!

Get a notebook, post-its or some coloured paper and come up with as many ideas as you can.
Imagine you have one million dollars and you can do anything you want. Imagine you had to use tech to do it. Then imagine you had no access to tech..what would you do?
Push yourself to come up with at least ten different ideas. Then take a break and try and come up with even more!
Think about the audience you chose and how you could best help them.

Once you’ve got a lot of ideas, choose the one you think would best solve your opportunity. This is your solution.

Remember there’s no such thing as a bad idea!

Before you share your ideas or spend time building something, it’s a good idea to test and improve your ideas. This process is called validation. This could be done by talking to your parents about what you have created and asking for some feedback. You could even consult the target group you are trying to help (this may not work if you are helping animals), but you can make it even better as you get more feedback on your idea. Don’t forget to try and avoid close contact with people and use the internet and the phone where possible.

Another great way to test is to create a prototype - this is a draft version of your idea. You can do this by drawing what your idea would look like, creating a mini-version, building something out of recycled materials, or creating a plan of what the idea could look like. You can then show your prototype to potential users and ask for their feedback.