Rhize
Summary
Rhize is a transnational movement-support organisation that runs the Global Coaching Fellowship (GCF), publishes training curricula for civil-society professionals under the brand name Movement Mindset, and operates as a clearing-house for movement coaches connecting experienced organisers across regions.
Body
Rhize describes itself as a network that coaches movements, trains organisations, and connects everyone to a global ecosystem of movement support; the name is a deliberate play on rhizome — the underground root-network that can sprout new growth from any node — and it is the image the organisation uses for the kind of distributed, peer-to-peer infrastructure it aims to build between coaches, organisers, and movements [source: rhize]. The organisation is registered as a US-based non-profit, but its work is deliberately transnational: the Let Movements Lead report (which Rhize positions as the definitive write-up of its coaching model) is built around the 2017–2018 Africa launch of the Global Coaching Corps, a network of movement coaches working in and across sub-Saharan African movements, and the report opens with a credit line In 18 months, Rhize… that is the report’s way of summarising its pilot outcomes [source: rhize].
The central programme is the Global Coaching Fellowship (GCF), which selects cohorts of movement leaders, coaches, trainers, organisers, and activists and pairs them with veteran mentors from other movements; each fellow receives the complete Rhize toolkit, a peer network and funding to apply these new skills to train movements in their local communities. The GCF is not a remote-only curriculum — the report and the home page both stress the role of in-person retreats where coaches connect with and learn from each other, and the central pedagogical claim is that the coaching model produces a force-multiplying effect: by training coaches rather than working with individual movements, a single coaching investment amplifies across every movement the coach works with [source: rhize].
For civil-society professionals working inside INGOs and foundations — the population Rhize identifies as the audience for its Movement Mindset curriculum — the offer is more conventional but still distinctive: an annual eight-week (and in some cycles five-week) virtual course titled Adopting a Movement Mindset that walks philanthropy and NGO staff through Introduction to Movements and Theories of Power; Movements and People Who Build Them; Movement Emergence and Development; Creating a Movement Mindset; and Action Planning Tools and Practice. The course features weekly ninety-minute webinars, optional one-on-one coaching support, and an action plan for how the participant’s organisation will work with movements in their community [source: rhize]. The Movement Mindset vocabulary Rhize uses is itself a deliberate borrowing from Maria J. Stephan, Sadaf Lakhani, and Nadia Naviwala’s 2015 US Institute of Peace paper Aid to Civil Society: A Movement Mindset, which Rhize credits at the bottom of its course description as the source of the term [source: rhize].
The methodology Rhize extracts from the coaching-pilot report and from the Movement Mindset curriculum is consistent across the two programmes. Coaching is conceived as a long-term partnership rather than a one-off training event — the report’s Real change takes time lesson is the explicit counter to short-cycle, deliverable-driven funder relationships. Coaches are encouraged to develop their own training operations rather than to remain in a delivery role under Rhize, because coaches who have independent operations have more sustainable results, including a greater ability to secure their own funding for their work. Movement mapping is treated as a core skill the coach has to cultivate — the practice of understanding the local context, and the relationship between different movements and actors, and of letting each movement define success on its own terms rather than the funder’s terms. Peer learning between coaches is treated as the locus of the model’s improvement, on the grounds that Rhize’s curriculum provides a starting point but it is essential for coaches to work together and learn from each other in order to push the learning curve forward [source: rhize].
For practitioners whose work is training-and-coaching rather than facilitating meetings, the value Rhize adds is the articulation of the coaching-of-trainers-of-coaches stack at a depth the rest of the practitioner corpus doesn’t reach: SessionLab and Training for Change describe the craft of designing a single workshop; Seeds for Change and the WfGA Konsens-Handbuch describe how to facilitate the workshop once designed; Rhize describes how a movement-support organisation invests in the people who then design and run many workshops over years. Treat as link-only — paraphrase, do not paste; the home page, the about page, the Adopting a Movement Mindset syllabus page, and the Let Movements Lead PDF report are the four artefacts that carry the corpus.
Use it for
Designing a coaching-of-trainers curriculum for a movement-support organisation; structuring a fellowship or cohort programme that invests in movement coaches rather than in individual movements; introducing civil-society professionals to the Movement Mindset vocabulary; building the long-term coaching infrastructure that an adopting a movement mindset curriculum presupposes.
Related
- affinity-groups
- coalition-building
- constructive-programme
- distributed-organizing
- framing-and-narrative
- leadership-development
- one-to-ones
- public-narrative
Open Questions
Verify the current licensing of the Adopting a Movement Mindset curriculum materials (the syllabus PDF was offered free to course registrants; the report Let Movements Lead was published open online; the home page does not state a unified licence, so each artefact is treated as link-only until verified).
Sources & verification
- sources/rhize — link-only — RAW rhize.org home page verified live (200 OK; 3821 chars); additional verification via the About Rhize subpage (200 OK; 693 chars), the Adopting a Movement Mindset course page (200 OK; 7194 chars), and the Let Movements Lead report page (200 OK; 4815 chars) on the same host.