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.
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.
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.
Restoring Justice, Restoring Life
Reclaiming faith, family, and belonging for LGBTIQ+ people of faith through Sacred Selves and Fearless Allies.
Placing youth in the role of community leader navigating the Just Energy Transition through their impact game Power to the People.
Shifting international solidarity from savior to comrade, inviting internationalists to be transformed by Palestinian communities.
Traveling the Amazon’s rubber routes with the Muyuna Flotilla, co-producing counter-narratives and living maps with Indigenous youth.
Economies of Regeneration
Making wealth redistribution culturally desirable among Gen Z inheritors through Trojan Horse Strategies for Wealth Class Traitorship.
Challenging the story that good African parents send their children to the city through the How to Rebuild a Village documentary and archive.
Building ARMADA to center BIPOC, migrant, and diaspora leadership within Europe’s food movement across four countries.
Building breakthrough narrative infrastructure for pay parity and workers’ rights through campaigns for family childcare providers and May Day Strong.
Building narrative infrastructure to reframe agroecology not as a farming method but as a way of life connecting land justice, culture, and political transformation.
Land Back to Right Relations
Building a community hub grounded in mātauranga Māori where whānau can return to their whenua to learn, heal, and reconnect.
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.
Building a living archive of human-wildlife coexistence stories in Gudalur, centering Indigenous elders and challenging the narrative of human-nature separation.
Proposing through poetic video a radical inversion: that education should travel to Indigenous children, rooted in their territories and living knowledge.
Bioregional Community Governance
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.
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.
Opening space within the People’s Climate Summit to explore Earth-centered and more-than-human perspectives on land and belonging.
Equipping refugee youth in Kakuma with digital storytelling tools to replace narratives of vulnerability with stories of leadership and innovation.
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.
Healing the Spirit, Healing the Earth
Exploring what becomes possible when Jewish and Latine Lutheran communities in South Minneapolis name themselves as kin through mutual aid and shared ritual.
Creating residential workshops for rural journalists to process secondary trauma and deepen their storytelling for their communities.
Supporting Toraja women in reclaiming traditional postpartum healing through workshops, storytelling, and zines.
Amplifying trans and queer survivors’ voices through the Nange Movement, shifting narratives from criminality toward dignity and collective care.
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.
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.
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.