BC teen's mission is to amplify voices impacted by climate change

Written By Peter Allan

Isabella at a women’s health event. Photo submitted by: Isabella Wen

 

By Patricia Lane & Isabella Wen

Isabella Wen helps those directly impacted by climate change find their voice. This 18-year-old high school student from Surrey, British Columbia, is a Starfish Canada 2026 Climate75 Fellow. She is also media team lead for the food sovereignty conversation hosted by UBC’s Health Together project. Inside Nyéléni: Conversations on Food Sovereignty has reached over 1,000 community leaders. She has taught a public-speaking series, Loudly Together, to over 300 youth in Ghana, Afghanistan and the United States. She is also the founder and co-host of Rose Tinted Ceilings, a podcast helping young women find their place in leadership.

Tell us about your work with Nyéléni.

My responsibility is to create compelling media and stories that help more people engage with the conversations unfolding through our interview series Inside Nyéléni, a project of Health Together in UBC’s department of family practice.

By listening to the voices of those whose hands plant seeds, fight for clean water, and refuse to be silenced when their communities are at risk, we can all be inspired by their visions for justice and learn from their strategies for building collective resilience and transforming communities.

There are stories of a woman in Karnataka, India, defying caste through love, and youth leaders in Sri Lanka reimagining what public health can be. They are already refusing to ask for permission to build a fairer world. In Kenya, community leader Kendi Juster inspired her community to prevent an impending drought by ending the culturally accepted practice of placing stones in the river and by planting trees along its banks to stop erosion. Her voice showed her community that they shared agency in caring for their environment for the benefit of all.

This idea that we can and must create our own futures, rather than be bound by existing social norms, is a theme running through all my work. The world desperately needs the voices of those who have not yet been heard, like the women we feature. When we hear them, we all grow stronger.

Take the story of Kendi Juster, a woman from Kenya who inspired her community to end an impending drought by discontinuing the culturally accepted practice of putting stones in the river and then to plant trees on its banks to stop erosion. Her voice has been used to show her people they can have shared agency in its care for the benefit of all.

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Peter Allan
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