WCC news: Five WCC fellows trace their climate work to home ground

Five young researchers joined the World Council of Churches (WCC) in 2026: four through the Climate Curve Constellations Fellowship, a programme placing early-career researchers with organizations working on climate change, and one returning for a second internship in the WCC’s work on children’s rights. They came from Nigeria, Uganda, Sierra Leone, and the United States. Ask any of them why climate justice, and the answer starts somewhere specific. A farm, a marsh, an audit desk. 06 August 2026 In Eruwa, a farming town in Oyo State, southwest Nigeria, Toyosi Olatayo grew up the daughter of a Baptist pastor, attending services at the Oke-Oba Baptist Church, part of the Nigerian Baptist Convention. Her grandfather grew cassava and okra. She followed him to the farm as a teenager to harvest. Most of her congregation farmed, too. She studied geography at the University of Ibadan. The question came from home. “Why are people working so hard and still struggling?” She returned to Eruwa afterwards and worked alongside smallholder farmers, mostly women, to reach better markets. At the WCC, she supports research and coordination in the Land, Water, and Food programme. She had expected to do research, and spends a good deal of time coordinating and organizing instead, which is what running a rural agribusiness had taught her. Accounting and auditing in Kampala paid Hella Nicole Tangu’s bills, but she wanted work tied more directly to climate change mitigation. Both the Anglican Church of Uganda and the Lugazi Catholic Diocese, which ran her high school, shaped her. A classmate in Uppsala, Sweden, where she is completing a master’s degree in sustainable development, mentioned the fellowship. The placement covered land, water, and food in the same term her coursework covered the water-energy-food nexus, the principle that water, energy, and food security cannot be planned separately. “It was a perfectly timed coincidence!” She now leads the WCC’s Seven Weeks for Water Lenten campaign. Maryjane Onyechesi found the opening on LinkedIn. She grew up at Saint Cletus Catholic Church in Nnewi, Anambra State, and had just finished a master’s degree in land and water systems at the University of British Columbia. Her work now is a survey of how WCC staff are putting the Ecumenical Decade of Climate Justice Action—the WCC’s ten-year commitment running from 2025 to 2034—into practice. The Florida Everglades set Roksanna Keyvan’s question. She spent childhood summers in the marshes, then 18 months interning with Wine to Water, a faith-based organization in North Carolina. Water, she came to think, “is not only an essential resource but also a fundamental human right and a cornerstone of human dignity.” She first encountered the WCC in 2025 while researching nuclear justice in the Marshall Islands, where communities face harm from nuclear weapons testing and strive for reparations and a say over their own land. A WCC blog post by Litokne Kabua, “We spoke up. Will you answer?” shaped the questions she went on to ask Marshallese youth climate activists. She now coordinates preparations for a joint conference in Chiang Mai of the WCC commissions and reference groups on Life, Justice, and Peace, the programme area covering justice, peace, and care for creation. Foday Bangura is Muslim. He attended Catholic and Anglican schools in Sierra Leone, but had no contact with the WCC until 2023, when it supported him, then 17, to take part in the summit on a new global financing pact called for by French president Emmanuel Macron. There he met Frederique Seidel, WCC senior programme lead for Children and Climate. He had assumed religious tolerance was rare outside Sierra Leone. He found otherwise. Born and raised in Kanikay, Bangura says that “through the grace of God, I was shaped into becoming an exception.” He is completing a second WCC internship while studying entrepreneurial leadership at the African Leadership University in Rwanda, working on children’s climate litigation and promoting “The Path of Justice,” a song set to a poem by Faith Sebwa, a teenage Kenyan campaigner who is deaf and speaks Kenyan Sign Language. “It is reminding me of how I have continuously stood for justice from childhood to a young adult today.” Olatayo, Tangu, and Keyvan all sit on the editorial team of the Living Planet Monitor, the WCC publication tracking food security, water resources, land use, and climate resilience across a continent. Tangu came to it from the water-energy-food nexus, Keyvan from water governance, Olatayo from cassava markets in Oyo State. What surprised them, they mostly agree on: Onyechesi named “how people from many countries and backgrounds work together for climate justice”; Keyvan, the responsibility handed to fellows rather than withheld from them; Tangu, seeing the finished Monitor become a source others use. On whether a young person reading this belongs here, they agree more strongly still. “I was afraid too,” Bangura said. “I mean I am Muslim, I was afraid that I would be rejected, it was the inverse, because I tried, I tested, and now I feel like I have a home here.” Keyvan’s hesitation was that she did not come from a Christian community; from her first day, she said, “those fears disappeared.” Tangu is blunter: “Next time you see an ad for interns, please apply!” The WCC opens internship and fellowship positions across its programmes through the year, and Climate Curve recruits new Constellations cohorts several times a year, placing fellows across its network of climate organizations with the WCC among them.  Young people in WCC member churches should be using this door. If you are one of them, or outside a member church as Bangura and Keyvan were, watch for the next call and put your name forward. “Your background is not something to hide,” Olatayo said. “It is part of what makes your contribution unique.” Understand a bit more Climate Curve Constellations Fellowship — The fellowship connects students and recent graduates to placements with climate-focused organizations. Several WCC research fellows and interns in the Land, Water, and Food programme have entered through this route. Placements are typically time-bound and research-oriented, and fellows are recruited internationally rather than through church networks alone.   Living Planet Monitor — The Monitor gives faith communities a regular overview of conditions in a particular continent, monitoring indicators on food security, water resources, land use, and climate resilience. It is used to share good practices and projects led by church-based organizations. Research fellows contribute to its research and editorial work.   Water-energy-food nexus — An analytical framework used in sustainability research and policy. It holds that water, energy, and food security cannot be planned separately: irrigating crops consumes energy, generating energy consumes water, and food production depends on both. The framework is taught in sustainable development programmes and increasingly shapes how agencies design land and water policy. We spoke up. Will you answer? — the blog post by Litokne Kabua that shaped Keyvan’s research questions Music video for the song “The Path of Justice” launched — background on Faith Sebwa’s poem and the song Bangura is promoting Constellations Fellowship — the Climate Curve programme through which four of the five arrived Ecumenical Decade of Climate Justice Action — the ten-year commitment Onyechesi is surveying See more

The World Council of Churches promotes Christian unity in faith, witness and service for a just and peaceful world. An ecumenical fellowship of churches founded in 1948, today the WCC brings together 356 Protestant, Orthodox, Anglican and other churches representing more than 580 million Christians in over 120 countries, and works cooperatively with the Roman Catholic Church. The WCC general secretary is Rev. Prof. Dr Jerry Pillay from the Uniting Presbyterian Church in Southern Africa.  Media contact: +41 79 507 6363; www.oikoumene.org/press Our visiting address is: World Council of Churches Chemin du Pommier 42 Kyoto Building Le Grand-Saconnex CH-1218 Switzerland