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Rhizome News · Doc Series · 2026 Cohort

Rhizome: Pathways for Regenerative Futures

23 fellows. 5 pathways. Across Palestine to Peru, Aotearoa to Uganda, Indonesia to South Central Los Angeles — working together toward narrative-led systems change.

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Rhizome Documentary Series

Episode 01 — Restoring Justice, Restoring Life

Created by the Rhizome Fellowship 2025, this episode depicts people and organizations around the world that are already the living solutions to systems crises.

In times of systems crises, what does it mean to restore justice? Follow the Queer Food Growing Collective from South Africa, healing through memory. Guanabara Pyranga from Brazil, creating knowledge from oral traditions. Eastern European activists from Romania, building narrative cohesion with social movements. And the Fuegas Fire Brigade from Argentina, defending and reconnecting with their territory.

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Rhizome Fellowship 2026

Meet the 2026 Cohort

We received an extraordinary number of applications this year — over 400 from more than 100 countries and territories. What set this cohort apart was not simply the strength of individual projects, but the way they spoke to each other. The 23 fellows of Rhizome⁴ represent something rare: a genuine diversity of context, struggle, and practice held together by a shared conviction that narratives are a tool for systems change.

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Pathway

Restoring Justice, Restoring Life

Restoring Justice

Shamim Salim & Chantel Fortuin
🇰🇪 Kenya

Reclaiming faith, family, and belonging for LGBTIQ+ people of faith through Sacred Selves and Fearless Allies.

Restoring Justice

Siphelele Mabaso & Chantel Masinga
🇿🇦 South Africa

Placing youth in the role of community leader navigating the Just Energy Transition through their impact game Power to the People.

Restoring Justice

Manal Tamimi & Nagham Ladadweh
🇵🇸 Palestine

Shifting international solidarity from savior to comrade, inviting internationalists to be transformed by Palestinian communities.

Restoring Justice

Daniel Martinez & Nathaly Chube
🇵🇪 Peru

Traveling the Amazon’s rubber routes with the Muyuna Flotilla, co-producing counter-narratives and living maps with Indigenous youth.

🤲

Pathway

Economies of Regeneration

Economies

Ivan March & Berenice Zambrano
🇬🇷 Greece

Making wealth redistribution culturally desirable among Gen Z inheritors through Trojan Horse Strategies for Wealth Class Traitorship.

Economies

Gregory Mwendwa wa Kiio & Mwaura Timothy
🇰🇪 Kenya

Challenging the story that good African parents send their children to the city through the How to Rebuild a Village documentary and archive.

Economies

Bianca Inês Pedro & Emmanuel Achiri
🇵🇹 Portugal

Building ARMADA to center BIPOC, migrant, and diaspora leadership within Europe’s food movement across four countries.

Economies

Angeles Solis & Gabriel Solano-Hernandez
🇺🇸 USA

Building breakthrough narrative infrastructure for pay parity and workers’ rights through campaigns for family childcare providers and May Day Strong.

Economies

Fernanda Vidal & Janosch Kamal
🇧🇷 Brazil · 🇬🇧 UK

Building narrative infrastructure to reframe agroecology not as a farming method but as a way of life connecting land justice, culture, and political transformation.

🏔️

Pathway

Land Back to Right Relations

Land Back

Matariki Makoare & Kaye-Maree Dunn
🇳🇿 Aotearoa New Zealand

Building a community hub grounded in mātauranga Māori where whānau can return to their whenua to learn, heal, and reconnect.

Land Back

Mahina Paishon & Anna Camacho
🌺 Hawaiʻi

Scaling a community-led model of wealth redistribution across the islands, shifting the story from private accumulation to waiwai as a living flow toward healing and reciprocity.

Land Back

Rhea A & Tariq T.
🇮🇳 India

Building a living archive of human-wildlife coexistence stories in Gudalur, centering Indigenous elders and challenging the narrative of human-nature separation.

Land Back

Maria Luisa Santana & Yurshell Rodríguez
🇧🇷 Brazil

Proposing through poetic video a radical inversion: that education should travel to Indigenous children, rooted in their territories and living knowledge.

🛖

Pathway

Bioregional Community Governance

Bioregional

Sim-Marcel Bilal & Ivan Serna
🇺🇸 USA

Leading Power Trip, a youth-led investigative media series demonstrating that power is made by people, and your block is exactly where you already have influence.

Bioregional

Katrine de Angeles & Isabella Noero
🇨🇴 Colombia · 🇸🇪 Sweden

Working with Sierra Nevada women in seed knowledge circles, centering the narrative that the health of a woman, a seed, and a mangrove are expressions of the same living system.

Bioregional

Müge Yıldırım & Deniz Gümüşel
🇹🇷 Türkiye

Opening space within the People’s Climate Summit to explore Earth-centered and more-than-human perspectives on land and belonging.

Bioregional

Musa Munga & Marcelin Petro
🇰🇪 Kenya · 🇨🇩 DRC

Equipping refugee youth in Kakuma with digital storytelling tools to replace narratives of vulnerability with stories of leadership and innovation.

Bioregional

Ariana Monteiro & Erika Pires Ramos
🇧🇷 Brazil

Creating a peer learning programme connecting communities who have survived forced displacement with those living under that threat — making visible that we need to remove the risks, not the people.

🌀

Pathway

Healing the Spirit, Healing the Earth

Healing

Arielle Lekach-Rosenberg & Hierald Osorto
🇺🇸 USA

Exploring what becomes possible when Jewish and Latine Lutheran communities in South Minneapolis name themselves as kin through mutual aid and shared ritual.

Healing

Ankita Anand & Ritwika Mitra
🇮🇳 India

Creating residential workshops for rural journalists to process secondary trauma and deepen their storytelling for their communities.

Healing

Michelin Sallata & Roberto Duma Buladja
🇮🇩 Indonesia

Supporting Toraja women in reclaiming traditional postpartum healing through workshops, storytelling, and zines.

Healing

Aggie Dennett Harmon & Isaac Bafaki
🇺🇬 Uganda

Amplifying trans and queer survivors’ voices through the Nange Movement, shifting narratives from criminality toward dignity and collective care.

Healing

Kay Michael & Tenielle Dunkley
🇬🇧 UK

Gathering families and young people to write Letters to and from the Earth and carry more-than-human voices through the streets of Islington in a procession of ecological reimagination.

Open Monthly Sessions

The Open Rhizome — Follow Along

We received an extraordinary number of applications this year (over 400) and the depth, creativity, and commitment across them made this a very difficult process. While only choosing 23, we wanted to offer all the other incredible projects a chance to access the tools, and a chance to follow along with the method.

We invite you to join us on the Monthly Open Rhizome Zoom sessions that run parallel to the Rhizome Fellowship from now until December. Each month we’ll share the theme and content of the Rhizome learning arc, and hold an open Zoom room where one of the Rhizome team will be present to offer support, reflections, or answer any questions you have.

Step Date · Time Register
1) ASK
Wed 29 July · 11:00–12:00 Mexico City

RSVP →

2) LISTEN
26 Aug · 11:00–12:00 Mexico City

RSVP →

3) UNDERSTAND
30 Sept · 11:00–12:00 Mexico City

RSVP →

4) RECODE
25 Nov · 11:00–12:00 Mexico City

RSVP →

5) HACK
9 Dec · 11:00–12:00 Mexico City

RSVP →

Introduction

Start Here — The Culture Hack Method

Before we delve into the five practical steps, we open with the metacrisis and its cultural roots — exploring the transformative power of narratives and their role in shaping systems and actions in the world. We also share our approach to Narrative-Led Systems Change: Justice plus Onto-Shift, which emphasizes that demands for justice must be paired with a deeper shift in ontologies — the fundamental ways we perceive, relate to, and engage with the world.

Open Call 1 · Narrative-led Systems Change

Open Call 2 · Rhizome Fellowship

Together, we Rhizome.