Strategic Disrupters Fellowship

A cohort-based, one-year fellowship for organizers, visionaries, and culture workers whose work sits at the margins

The Strategic Disruptors Fellowship will be offered for the first time in 2027! 

Through this fellowship program, a cohort of Strategic Disruptors will be resourced deeply – and entrusted – to develop cross-sectoral interventions that move us toward the kind of pluralistic, interdependent democracy our future requires. 

Strategic Disrupters are visionaries, bridge builders, world builders, and culture workers. They are committed to shifting culture, rewriting the narratives that shape the organizing principles of our lives, mobilizing communities, building accessible movements, and making scalable shifts in the spaces where they hold influence. Their work spans fields – from organizing to healing practice to art, and beyond.

We are living through a rising tide of authoritarianism, polycrises, a culture of mass disinformation and deepening isolation and division that asks people to obey in advance. Movements continue to fight this tide tirelessly, but often are doing so without a shared analysis and without a container to increase our individual and shared capacities within. We believe that the antidote is not more strategy distributed in hierarchical fashion; we believe it is a re-membering of the transformative organizing strategies found in nature (mycelial, fractal, adaptive). 

While moments like these may have us reaching for ready-made solutions, we believe that the urgency and unprecedented nature of our times requires zooming out and investing in organizers and culture workers to envision, develop, and build new coordinated interventions at scale.

Why Strategic Disrupters?

Fellowship Structure

In the 2027 fellowship year, six Strategic Disrupters will receive support that many leaders have longed for in the beginning phases of the work. This could include but is not limited to:

  • A stipend of $25,000 (or more, as resources allow)

  • Training and capacity-building around 1) embodiment and somatics; 2) relational skills and presence; and 3) concrete skills and strategic capacities such as conflict transformation, communications, coalition building, fundraising, etc. This will include access to a Wise Counsel of experts in the field, consultants with hard skills, etc

  • Guidance to identify what their precise desired impact is and support to create personal and interpersonal development plans toward it

  • Coaching and mentorship from lead facilitators Prentis Hemphill and Mariah Rooney, as well as from members of a Wise Counsel 

  • Regular virtual cohort gatherings and in-person residency time at The Embodiment Institute’s land project Owl Song

The project team will provide platforms for fellows to share and amplify their interventions, as well as documentation of our process and learnings to support ongoing strategies. 

Strategic Disrupters will be selected by invitation only.

Make a contribution to support Strategic Disrupters

This approach involves building the capacity of individuals who are well positioned — with experience, wisdom and a learning orientation — to carry out transformational work. It also involves trust and risk: deep investment in change agents who require the time, space, tools and resources to identify their needs, develop and coordinate their strategies, and enact the creative, embodied and relational interventions that can disrupt the status quo and move us toward freedom.

This cohort prioritizes those whose work germinates in the margins. We focus on people who are racialized, oppressed, marginalized, and systemically under-resourced, yet continue to carry their communities with vision and care. This is not a fellowship for the already-amplified and well-resourced — it is an opportunity for the disruptors whose genius rarely receives the spotlight and support it deserves.

This project has received generous core funding from Pepita Foundation, and we continue to seek financial support to expand the resourcing we can offer to fellows. To learn more and discuss this opportunity, please reach out to:
mariah@mariahrooney.com

About the fellowship leads

Prentis Hemphill

(all pronouns) is the co-founder of The Embodiment Institute. Prentis is a writer and cartographer of emotions, an embodiment facilitator, political organizer and therapist. They are also the host of acclaimed podcasts, Finding Our Way and Becoming the People, and the author of the book What It Takes to Heal. 

For the last ten years, Prentis has practiced and taught somatics in social movement organizations and offered embodied practice during moments of social unrest and organizational upheaval. They have taught embodied leadership with Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity and generative somatics. They served as the Healing Justice Director of Black Lives Matter Global Network from 2016 to 2019. Their work and writing have appeared in the New York Times, the Huffington Post. They are a contributor to ‘You are Your Best Thing’, edited by Tarana Burke and Brené Brown, ‘Holding Change’ by adrienne maree brown, and ‘The Politics of Trauma’ by Staci Haines. They live in North Carolina on a small farm with their partner, child and two dogs.

Mariah Rooney

(they/she) is a trauma therapist, educator, and organizer working at the intersections of trauma healing, justice, and collective transformation. Mariah has coordinated mutual aid efforts and collaboratively built trauma-informed crisis response systems for communities navigating unrest, displacement, and disaster. Their work is grounded in the belief that care is itself a form of movement infrastructure, and that the people doing crisis and care work need care of their own. They are a somatics practitioner and teacher and the founder of Trauma Informed Weight Lifting, a program of the Center for Trauma and Embodiment, which builds embodied strength and nervous-system resilience in community settings

Mariah’s practice has focused on healing the complex challenges that arise as a result of traumatic stress, attachment trauma, intergenerational trauma, and severe dissociation. Additionally, her research and writing has focused on areas such as gender-related violence, sexual trauma, trauma-informed embodiment practices, developmental trauma, and systems-level interventions. Mariah is also a trauma consultant who supports capacity-building and systems change work to prevent and address the effects of violence and trauma within individual agencies and schools, coalitions, and multi-agency collaboratives. They believe healing is inseparable from the political and material conditions that produce harm in the first place, and that communities and movements are strongest when the people doing the work are also held.

The Embodiment Institute

The fellowship is housed in The Embodiment Institute (TEI), a training institute, research entity, and culture change engine that strategically develops people and organizations to be agents of transformation in families, social movements, and the environment. TEI is a 501c3 non-profit organization.