Our Work
Narrative & Healing
Narrative & Healing
For our Narrative & Healing framework, Rhiza integrates processes of storytelling, arts, and healing with methods of psychosocial support, to strengthen local systems of care and mobilize collective capacities for resilience and recovery.
Here is some of our Narrative & Healing work:
HEAL INTO ACTION
Although the international refugee crisis has mostly faded from the media, the reality on the ground for millions of refugees worldwide remains a crisis. In Greece, the refugee camps and communities are floundering in the face of diminishing resources as the number of refugee arrivals has surged, with people desperately seeking to make the trip before winter falls. Nearly 7000 refugees are crowded into camps in Lesvos that are meant to house 2500. Once viewed as a temporary entry point for refugees, Greece has now become a years-long stop on an indefinite journey.
Our project Heal into Action builds on the previous work we have done in Greece. The integrated training we have developed creates a foundation of healing for refugee communities, as well as the frontline staff supporting them, to collectively process their experience and manage trauma, create narratives of their experience through storytelling and theatre, and develop advocacy skills to insert their stories and perspectives into policy discussions.
Sustainable Leadership
Sustainable Leadership
For our Sustainable Leadership framework, Rhiza works with organizations to develop leadership development programs rooted in individual and collective transformation, recognizing that dismantling oppression requires not only organizing to shift external power structures, but also building power from the inside out. We tailor programs that build and sustain grassroots leadership using resilience and healing frameworks, political education, and skill-building.
Here are some of our Sustainable Leadership projects:
NY WORKER CENTER FEDERATION
LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT AND ORGANIZING
Rhiza has an ongoing partnership with the New York Worker Center Federation (WCF), an alliance of organizations whose members embody diversity across race, gender, age, language, nationality, and religion, and work as day laborers, street vendors, restaurant and food service workers, retail workers, domestic workers, and warehouse workers.
CENTRO DE LOS DERECHOS DEL MIGRANTE
LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT & INTERSECTIONAL ORGANIZING
Rhiza developed a two-day series of workshops for the Migrant Defense Committee of Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, an organization that “empowers Mexico-based migrant workers to defend and protect their rights as they move between their home communities in Mexico and their workplaces in the United States” through training, leadership development, litigation, and policy advocacy. The Committee is made up of community-based leaders in Mexico who are migrants and ex-migrants organizing and educating their fellow migrants to defend workers’ rights.
Collaborative Filmmaking
Collaborative Filmmaking
Through our Collaborative Filmmaking framework, Rhiza brings a feminist and decolonial approach to impact filmmaking. Our process-oriented methodology focuses not only on product, but sustained collaboration with organizations and frontline communities. Many of our projects seek to tell community-level stories of resilience and hope in the face of crisis and trauma from forced migration or environmental devastation.
Here are some of our Collaborative Filmmaking projects:
Above and Below the Ground tells the story of daring indigenous women activists and rock musicians who come together in the ongoing struggle against the Myitsone Dam and for environmental self-determination across their native Kachinland. Through investigation, protest, prayer, and music, they test the boundaries of tentative democratic reform in Northern Myanmar, and work to create a future in which native peoples have the right to care for and protect their own lands and natural resources.
Click here to read more about this feature-length documentary film.
SOCIAL JUSTICE MUSIC VIDEOS
Social justice music videos combine the contagious power of music with compelling visuals to expose injustice and inspire potential allies into action. In a workshop for the Echo Park Film Center, we shared case studies showing how such videos can prepare the ground for local organizing or turn a small campaign into a transnational sensation, bringing in key new allies that can shift the balance of power. Participants from traditionally media marginalized communities also shot and edited their own music videos.