Are you a narrative practitioner, artist, academic, journalist, storyteller, or activist working at the intersection of reimagining cultural narratives and systems change? Do you believe in the power of narratives to challenge dominant paradigms and co-create regenerative futures?
The Rhizome Fellowship 2026 is a program offered by Culture Hack Labs. Twenty organizations and forty fellows have been admitted to this year’s 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 their interconnection. The 46 fellows across 23 organizations of 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.
The Rhizome Fellowship is designed to equip you with tools and accompany you through a process of narrative-led systems change. Rooted in the Culture Hack Method, this fellowship provides a structured yet experimental space to develop and prototype narrative interventions that disrupt extractive models and seed regenerative futures.
This gathering is held for the 2026 cohort of the Rhizome Fellowship.
Culture Hack Labs (CHL) is a not-for-profit consultancy that supports organizations, social movements and activists to create cultural interventions for systems change.
Our process is based on an integrated set of tools and techniques to track, research and intervene in cultural narratives. We capture and map large volumes of social data using the Culture Hack Platform. We then analyze the networks, language, and deep logics to develop insights and content to evolve culture.
TIERRA VALIENTE | BRAVE EARTH
Brave Earth is located between San Ramon and La Fortuna, nestled in between Arenal Volcano and the Children’s Eternal Rainforest, the largest reserve of protected wildlife in Costa Rica.
As a living lab, we have experimented with different building modalities using AirCrete and materials sourced on the land including bamboo and adobe. We have implemented biophilic design, closed-loop systems and permaculture design principles. Ornamental, food, and medicinal gardens surround the center as well as hiking trials to a nearby river, and a natural swimming pond.
CULTURES OF TRANSITION
The impulse for Tierra Valiente stems from an awareness of our civilizational trajectory within the dominant culture with its source code of extraction, domination, commodification, colonization, control, entitlement, and separation from the living world.
We are both informed by this critical lens and inspired to create outside of the old values and incentive landscapes to build a culture based on reciprocity, regeneration and resiliency.
In this collective transition - whether you call it the Anthropocene, the Kali Yuga, late-stage capitalism or capitalist modernity - our intention is to become more attuned to this cultural context in order to decolonize the conditioning of the dominant system and be in deeper service to our collective potential.