From Classroom to Community: Mariama Jalloh Brings Mentorship to Sierra Leone Schools
For SELA fellow Mariama Jalloh, sustainability outreach meant walking straight into the rooms where the next generation of leaders is actually being shaped. A fellow from Sierra Leone, Mariama used her individual outreach stage — the requirement every SELA fellow completes independently in their own community — to visit several secondary schools, pairing broad sustainability engagement with something more deliberate: direct, one-on-one mentorship for students.
Her outreach took her to three schools: St. Edward’s Secondary School, St. Joseph’s Secondary School, and The Prince of Wales School. At each, she met students where they were, translating fellowship-level material on sustainability and climate literacy into language and examples a teenager could immediately connect to their own daily life — not abstractions about global systems, but concrete choices they could act on that week.
At St. Joseph’s Secondary School, Mariama’s outreach went further than a single visit. She requested and secured a meeting with the school’s management to discuss how sustainability awareness might be built into student life on an ongoing basis, rather than arriving once and disappearing. Out of that conversation came a dedicated mentorship session for St. Joseph’s students — a chance for them to sit across from a young Sierra Leonean already working in the sustainability space, close enough in age to feel accessible, far enough along to offer guidance that actually landed.
“I wanted students to see sustainability as something they could actually lead on, not just a topic in a textbook,” Mariama said. “Meeting with the school’s management first made sure the message wasn’t just a one-off visit — it was something the school itself could keep building on after I left.”
Across all three schools, the throughline was the same: awareness paired with access. Students weren’t just told sustainability mattered; they were given room to ask an actual practitioner what a path into the field might look like for someone from their own country, their own background, sitting in the same classroom they sit in now. For many, it was the first time they’d had that conversation with anyone.
Mariama’s project is, in miniature, exactly what the outreach stage of the SELA Fellowship exists to produce — not a generic community event, but a fellow reading her own context precisely and building something suited to it. For her, that meant three schools, a management meeting, and a mentorship session whose effects will likely outlast the memory of the fellowship term itself.
