Sungu's Story
Sungu Oyoo came to Rhize when he applied to be amongst our first class of Rhize Catalyst fellows, a 6-month virtual program that paired activists leading movements with an experienced coach to go through a process of examining and strengthening their struggles to be more robust, recruit more people and ultimately become more sustainable.
Sungu was amongst the dozen or so leaders that launched Kenyans for Tax Justice 2013 to protest a bill up for vote in Kenyan Parliament that would levy heavy taxation on basic commodities that would threaten the livelihoods of at least half of the Kenyan population.
Sungu helped lead the campaign to successfully defeat the tax, but his fellow catalysts knew that the threat of this tax was only part of a larger issue: Increasing taxes on the general public without seeing improvement to the basic services the taxes are intended for: education, healthcare, clean water and sanitation, roads and basic infrastructure, housing.
So, they decided to keep going. Sungu and two other KTJ members applied for the Rhize fellowship at a moment when they felt their movement was having a hard time keeping their momentum going. Sungu started working diligently with his Rhize coach, also a former Rhize catalyst.
Crisis Strikes
During the fellowship in April, crisis struck when one of the KTJ leaders was abducted by the police the night before a big rally they were planning. He was ultimately found alive but badly beaten, 300 miles away from Nairobi, but it was obvious their security was at risk and strategies needed to be recalculated.
With the movement at this critical juncture, Sungu, with the help of the team at Rhize, decided a training in Kenya would be the most effective way to get him and his team the skills they needed to navigate such a precarious situation and to ensure unity amongst the scared and partially scattered group. Erin, Rhize’s Founder & Executive Director, flew to Kenya to lead an 8-day workshop to help them build their movement identity, learn security strategies and re-launch their efforts in a stronger, more unified way.
As part of the Rhize ethic, the goal is not just to strengthen movements but to create a capacity where movement leaders can coach others -- flying Americans in from the US every time there’s a crisis is not sustainable for anyone. So, while working with Sungu, Erin identified him and a few others as potential Rhize Coaches -- those who not only had the tools to lead their own movement but the skills to teach others how to do the same. To put them on the path to coaches, Erin took Sungu and another catalyst, Ruth Mumbi to Uganda to lead a training with a burgeoning movement there.
Success of the Rhize model
Sungu and Mumbi’s growth from movement leaders to coaches is a direct result of the fellowship model Rhize has created: Through access to tools and trainings we can dramatically scale the number of people powered movements all over the world.
We’ve done all of this on a shoestring budget and have even bigger plans for 2016. So we hope you’ll support our endeavors next year with a donation that can be used to continue to allow people like Sungu to foment real change in their communities.