What is Champions?

Dydine in Chicago, June 2026

What if leadership was centered on what makes us human?

What happens when healthcare systems, businesses, schools, communities — even families — begin to lose sight of the humanity in one another?

And what might happen if enough people chose another way, a way centered on humanity?

Dydine’s story offers a remarkable perspective on these questions.

I have been privileged to know Dydine for more than 14 years. She is a survivor of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda and today lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Alex.

Her story and the story of Champions are intertwined.

In recent years, Dydine’s work has moved from personal testimony into institution-building.

Through Kind Kulture, which she co-founded with Alex, she is developing storytelling as a practical method for healing, empathy education and cultural change: story as mirror, story as bridge, and story as change.

Her speaking has taken her into museums, universities, companies and law enforcement settings, including the Museum of Tolerance, Harvard Kennedy School, Talks at Google, TEDx and Cornell.

She has also launched Umunyana Coffee, a purpose-driven Rwandan coffee brand rooted in heritage, dignity and economic justice.

In June 2026, I invited Dydine to Chicago to experience Champions for herself.

What she encountered led to a simple observation:

Humanity is already within us. But it has to be activated, strengthened and called forward.

So, what is Champions?

My friend Andy is a journalist of some 40 years, so together we played around with how best to describe it.

We came back to this:

Champions is a movement enabling people, teams and communities to thrive by centering leadership on what makes us human.

There are three important ideas within that sentence.

It is a movement. Champions is ultimately about people, not a programme.

It centers leadership on what makes us human. Trust, empathy, courage, judgement, accountability, resilience, creativity, relationships and the capacity to act for the good of others are not peripheral to leadership. They are central to it.

The outcome is thriving. Our proposition is that humanity is not simply a nice-to-have. People and organisations perform better when trust is stronger, relationships work and people are able to bring more of their human capability to what they do.

Or, more simply:

Humanity is a performance multiplier

Glen with Dydine and her husband, Alex (center) in 2023

How does Champions work?

At the centre is a simple pathway:

Choice → Connection → Creation

Choice begins with agency: who do I choose to become, and how do I choose to show up?

Connection recognises that none of us does this alone. Relationships with colleagues, friends, mentors, family and others can strengthen us, challenge us and call forward the best in us.

Creation turns choice and connection into action — what we actually do, build, repair or change.

Around this pathway, Champions combines stories, reflection, cohort learning and practical leadership tools. Participants develop greater self-awareness, strengthen relationships and practise what they learn in everyday life.

It is not about being soft or avoiding difficult conversations.

It is about how we lead, serve, listen, challenge, repair and create while remaining grounded in what makes us human.

Dydine sees Champions at work

During her visit to Chicago, Dydine spent time with the senior team at Union Health Service, where Champions has been working with staff and leaders since June 2025.

What struck her was not a strategy document or a set of slides.

It was the people. She saw joy and energy. She heard people talking about their work with renewed pride.

She heard how staff had become more willing to speak honestly, to be vulnerable and to share what they were carrying.

One leader described staff coming into her office and feeling able to cry.

For Dydine, that was not weakness. It was evidence that trust was growing.

And in healthcare that matters. Caring for others is not mechanical. It asks something of the whole person.

When people become depleted, disconnected or unable to speak honestly, performance and wellbeing suffer. When trust and connection grow, something different becomes possible.

Ubumuntu

For Dydine, a word at the heart of all this is ubumuntu.

In Kinyarwanda, ubumuntu means humanity — but it carries a richer meaning than the abstract English word sometimes conveys.

It speaks to the goodness of being human: kindness, conscience, generosity and responsibility.

It also encompasses qualities such as creativity, judgement and resilience — and the capacity to act for the good of others, sometimes at our own expense.

In Rwandan culture, to say someone has ubumuntu is to recognise something about the kind of human being they are.

Dydine has also seen what happens when humanity is suppressed by fear, anger, ideology, trauma or pressure.

But she believes it can be called forward again. Her own life gives that conviction unusual weight.

Dydine’s story

Dydine was three-and-a-half years old during the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi.

The aftermath was her childhood.

When she later encountered peace education at the Kigali Genocide Memorial, it helped her see Rwanda's history not only through the lens of her own pain, but from a wider perspective.

She began to understand that other young people — including children of perpetrators — were also carrying consequences of a history they had not chosen.

It did not erase what had happened. It did not make injustice less real.

But it opened another path.

Dydine began to see how stories could heal, how young people could better understand themselves and others, and how inherited pain did not have to determine what came next.

That experience is one reason she connects so strongly with Champions.

She knows what it means for a young person to be met by adults and mentors who say:

Your life is not over. Your future is not already written. You have value. You have choices.

Giving young people agency

As Dydine reflected in Chicago, young people are at a formative stage of life. They are open to possibility, but also vulnerable to influence.

She made a particularly important observation: hate is often loud. It is passionate. It gathers attention.

Goodness, love and kindness can be quieter. Young people notice what is loud. They are shaped by what they see, hear and experience.

So what do we put around them?

Do we leave them to be shaped by cynicism, hatred, division, grievance and despair?

Or do we create spaces where they can develop confidence, build relationships, discover their own capacity to contribute and become people who build rather than break?

Dydine knows these questions personally. And that is why she has agreed to become an Ambassador for Champions.

The power of a few

Champions also works from a hopeful premise: widespread change does not necessarily require everyone to move first.

Research into nonviolent social movements, including the work of Dr Erica Chenoweth, has demonstrated the influence that relatively small proportions of actively engaged people can have on much larger systems.

Champions takes a practical lesson from this: start with people who want to act.

Bring small groups together. Strengthen their leadership and relationships. Give them tools they can use. Then enable them to carry those behaviours into their teams, families and communities.

The ambition is not to make everyone a Champion overnight.

It is to develop enough people who choose to go first.

We complete each other

This is one of Dydine’s reflections in Chicago stayed with me.

Every person is a piece of a wider human puzzle. Even when someone feels alone, their life and contribution still matter. Without them, the picture is incomplete.

That feels particularly relevant today.

Many people are lonely or exhausted. Workplaces are under pressure. Young people are uncertain about the future. Communities can become divided by mistrust.

Champions cannot solve all of those problems. But it can start somewhere much closer to home: with us.