Across the world, parents, grandparents, and caregivers are taking climate action to protect the kids they love, children everywhere, and our shared home.
Our Climate Parent Fellowship aims to support key organizers of parent-led, intergenerational, or family-focused climate engagement work across the globe.
Since 2021, we have supported 41 organizers from 25 countries through our year-long Fellowship program. We have supported campaigners, grassroots organizers, communicators, indigenous leaders, artists, and educators to grow and develop their climate work.
Our Fellowship is now closed for applications for the 2025 cohort. The one-year Fellowship will begin in January 2025.
For our 2025 cohort, we are looking for leaders within a parent-led, intergenerational, or family-focused climate project, group, organization, strategy, or idea. Our Fellows will be the core drivers and key decision-makers of the climate initiative they are working on, which will have the capacity to grow, be replicated or scaled.
We are particularly interested in candidates who are working on some of Our Kids’ Climate strategic campaign priorities, such as clean air, fossil fuel phase-out, and a fast and fair transition to renewable energy. However, as in other cohorts, we anticipate our 2025 Fellows to be approaching parent-led, intergenerational, or family-focused climate work in a diverse variety of ways. We are also interested in supporting some Fellows engaged around COP30.
Fellows will take part in monthly training sessions, receive mentorship, and a stipend of between $15,000 – $20,000 USD, which aims to make their climate organizing work more sustainable.
Successful Fellows will be those seeking not only funding, but also the global community, peer-to-peer mentoring, experience sharing, and leadership development that is at the heart of our Fellowship Program.
We anticipate recruiting 10 Fellows, and as in previous years, at least half of the Fellows will be from the Global South.
Our selection criteria gives more details on what we look for in our Fellows and who is eligible to apply. This has been crafted specifically for the 2025 cohort.
We have also provided a FAQ that covers our recruitment and selection process and what you can expect from the Fellowship year.
Meet Our Current Fellows
Ana is an economist, researcher, and painter who blends evidence-based insights with everyday experiences to inspire and mobilize people in the fight for climate and social justice. She has been building a group of parents, grandparents, uncles, and aunts in Quito, Ecuador all united in their vision for the well-being of Ecuadorian children and their sustainable future. Motivated by her three-year-old daughter and a deep concern for Ecuador’s environmental and social issues, her activism is geared towards promoting sustainable consumption and environmentally responsible behaviors. She aims to leverage both evidence and the power of art to expand her group into a more inclusive and diverse collective of Ecuadorian families.
Anne is a parent, an advocate for climate justice, and an independent scholar. She is a key organizer with For Our Kids Toronto – a group of parents and caregivers who advocate for climate justice. She also serves on the Toronto School Board’s Environment Committee, the Toronto Climate Action Network, and the Board of Environmental Education Ontario. Anne is using these networks to find ways for schools to engage with Toronto’s climate action plan. She is focusing on stimulating diverse climate conversations in school communities. Anne is also currently supporting a key climate court case against Ontario in which her daughter is one of the young plaintiffs.
Beree is a teacher, social worker, and art therapist from Mongolia. After growing up in a nomadic family as an orphan alongside eight other siblings, she is determined to help others overcome challenges. She brings expertise working in child’s rights organizations, such as Save the Children and World Vision, and the experience of founding multiple projects to her current climate engagement work. Mongolia is extremely vulnerable to climate impacts and nomadic communities are particularly impacted. Beree is working with families to increase climate knowledge and provides eco-art therapy programs for children and adults who experience flooding, severe air pollution, and other climate impacts.
Chévanni is an indigenous father, writer, and planetary activist, who founded the Reimagined Learning Community in South Africa. Their work, rooted in indigenous practices, integrates restorative parenting, community, and indigenous imaginations to inform our sacred climate responsibility. Chévanni conceives parenting as extending beyond caring for young people to encompass the well-being of the living planet. During the Fellowship, they will be focused on growing Reimagined Learning Communities, which serves as a transformative hub, fostering holistic education and nurturing connections with learning, community, and the Earth.
A writing professor based in Austin, Texas, Eileen founded The Parents’ Climate Community in 2019 to connect with other local caregivers worried about climate change. She works to create accessible forms of activism for busy parents and her group is currently focused on connecting families to a campaign against a mega-highway expansion through the city. Her group has created a film as a tool to communicate the health and climate impacts of the project. Eileen believes that in coming together to protect our kids’ futures, we can also address our isolation as parents, strengthen relationships within our families and in our communities, and nurture our own agency and well-being.
Erika is a mother and fiction writer from Sweden. When the Rebellmammorna (Rebel Moms) movement formed in Sweden, Erika got involved at an early stage, drawn by the simplicity of the movement’s circle protests. The movement, which started out with a handful of mothers, now exists in over 25 countries on all major continents. During the Fellowship, Erika will be focused on how to strengthen the size and impact of Mothers* Rebellion, their international network, and their coordinated circles.. Erika wants to help make the group’s circles a prominent voice in the call for climate action.
Ernst John is a musician and events coordinator from Amsterdam. He has been organizing on sustainability issues and European cooperation since the mid-nineties. Over the past three years he has played a critical role in bringing national and local elders and grandparent groups together into what is now the official association European Grandparents for Climate. During the Fellowship, he will be working to strengthen and expand this coalition and will focus on internal and external capacity building, as well as exchanging good practices and inspiring intergenerational actions.
Liat is a climate organizer and early childhood educator based in Brooklyn, New York. A long-time activist focused on education, democracy, and climate, she is now the co-founder and co-chair of Climate Families NYC. She has helped to grow Climate Families from a small group of moms to a movement of over a thousand parents across the city. In the coming year, she hopes to double their active members, build out a distributed schools-based organizing structure, and move the needle on legislative and finance campaigns through powerful, kid-friendly, and effective direct actions. She is a parent to an almost two-year-old who loves to protest and yell about how fossil fuels have got to go!
Lisa Maria is a mother, writer, and educator who serves as community weaver and riverkeeper for the Colectivo Rescate del Rio San Pedro, a group that creates intergenerational Mingas to clean and rescue the San Pedro River in Quito, Ecuador. Made famous by the Inca, Mingas bring together allies across generations to clean the river while providing an educational, art-filled eco-festival. Over the past two years, the Colectivo Rescate del Río San Pedro has hosted 15 Mingas, harnessing over 8500+ volunteer hours to remove over 12 tonnes of garbage. Lisa Maria is a member of the advisory board for the collective and Director of the Minga Mundial Foundation.
Niya is a young indigenous Idu Mishmi woman from Arunachal Pradesh, in India. The Idu Mishmi are known for their deep cultural understanding of the interdependency between people and nature and for protecting their uniquely biodiverse region. Niya’s project engages mothers working on communal land to revive ancestral knowledge and traditional crops for climate resilience, while also educating mothers on climate and recognizing the key role they play in society. She is a member of the Management Committee of Elopa Etugu Community Eco Cultural Preserve, working to strengthen inter-generational knowledge transfer and improve the socio-economic wellbeing and health of their members.
Miriam is a mother, environmentalist, farmer, and climate advocate from Kisumu, Kenya. Miriam was inspired to get involved in climate solutions by her daughter Rahmina Paullete, a young Fridays For Future activist and founder of Kisumu Environmental Champions. Miriam currently manages Kisumu Environmental Champions and is active in the Let Lake Victoria Breathe Again campaign. Through this work, she has developed a network of parents and children active in environmental conservation and climate action. During her Fellowship, she aims to expand the group’s diverse campaigns to include more parents working to empower children in climate advocacy.
Shristi is an environmental and animal rights activist from Nepal committed to finding solutions that will help protect our natural environment for future generations. She believes that we need to take a holistic approach to our interactions with animals to ensure they are treated with the respect and dignity they deserve. She campaigns to protect the natural environment through People’s Alliance for Nature Nepal and Women in Nature network. Working in collaboration with others, she has created urban pocket forests to tackle air pollution and water shortages and uses theater and storytelling to pass on the conversation messages to the next generation.
Thabo is a social worker and climate activist who works with communities in climate-affected regions of Manicaland, Zimbabwe. Her work is centered on climate resilience and adaptation to protect the rights of vulnerable groups such as women, children, and the less privileged. She initiated a project in her community – the Chipinge Crocheting Group – which brings different generations together to tackle plastic waste and generate income for climate resilience. Thabo is working to further develop this model and expand the project to other communities in Zimbabwe. In 2023, Thabo was also a delegate for the Climate Youth Summit in Tanzania, Unleash Rwanda, and the Climate Reality training in Ghana.
Valinda is a passionate human-centered design lead, organizer, and community leader who works at the intersection between environmental, racial, economic, health, and housing justice. Valinda brings extensive experience to their work exploring how communities of color and immigrant communities can challenge systemic injustice. Recently Valinda’s work has focused on air pollution and founding the Logan Community Clean Air Coalition. Through practical interventions such as installing air quality sensors to collect data and air purifiers in home daycare centers, Valinda takes an intersectional approach to addressing the impacts of air pollution beyond climate and environmental spaces. Valinda also is a Team Co-Coordinator with Mothers Out Front and is on the Core Team of Mutual Aid Eastie.
Some 27 climate organizers from 19 countries were supported in our first two Fellowship cohorts. Read the bios of our former Fellows here and learn about their vital work.
What do our former Fellows say?
“The Fellowship has widened my view. I have had a chance to witness the great work of parents all over the world. I have a chance to work with them and learn from them. I have had a chance to transfer their spirit to Vietnamese parents.”
“This Fellowship has allowed me to not only grow as a leader but how to learn to be a good one. It was invaluable being given the time to really develop and build the foundations of the parent climate movement in New Zealand.”
“The Climate Parent Fellowship has been the kickstarter for bigger and better climate action. It has helped grow the Rodzice dla Klimatu movement. Now we are working on a lot of fields simultaneously and breaking through the climate bubble that it is so challenging to get out of.”
“It gives you confidence, it gives you the idea that there is a world, a family beyond your immediate locality, you now have a global family that you can talk to and share your experiences with. So when it says it connects, empowers and supports that is exactly what the Fellowship does.”
“It has been an invaluable incubator for creativity, problem solving and community-driven climate organizing. We have so much to learn from and with each other and this Fellowship has been an invaluable place to connect, reflect and grow new ideas and approaches.”