Building Leadership Through Faith and Fellowship

Through a catalytic partnership with Trinity Church, Mountaintop International is shaping the next generation of Anglican community changemakers in Africa. 

When Ugandan civil engineer Musingo Mercy first envisioned the impact of Climate Girls Win, the organization she founded to empower young women to become environmental innovators, she imagined reaching someone exactly like 18-year-old Naburefe Joan.  

Before joining Climate Girls Win, Naburefe never saw herself as a changemaker in her village of Namawanga in Eastern Uganda’s Mbale district. Severely affected by climate change, her region had experienced catastrophic floods and landslides in 2024 that destroyed more than 1,700 homes — along with schools, health facilities, and critical water infrastructure. While Naburefe and other young women in her village are among the most vulnerable to the impacts of such disasters, they have largely been excluded from creating the climate resilience solutions that could preserve the community’s access to shelter, education, healthcare services, and clean water. 

That situation began to change when Naburefe joined Climate Girls Win. Designed by Musingo specifically to turn girls and young women into local climate leaders, the initiative gave Naburefe the education and tools she needed not only to help members of her community but to mobilize them. Thanks to the program, Naburefe turned her newfound understanding of climate change and resilience into an innovative project of her own: a tree-planting campaign that engaged 40 students and teachers at her secondary school. It was Naburefe’s first experience leading any kind of public climate action — and also the first-ever tree-planting initiative in Namawanga led by a woman of any age. 

“That moment represents a young girl moving from awareness to action, and from participation to leadership,” says Musingo, who developed the Climate Girls Win program with the help of Mountaintop International. A Washington, DC-based nonprofit, Mountaintop is dedicated to identifying local leaders in low-income communities around the globe and giving them the resources they need to address systemic challenges.  

In 2024, as part of its Leadership Development initiative, Trinity Church awarded Mountaintop a $120,000 project grant to support the expansion of the organization’s international fellowship. Trinity’s funding unlocked resources to ensure Mountaintop’s program reached Anglican leaders who, like Musingo, draw upon their Christian faith as they work to make communities safer, healthier, more sustainable, and more economically vibrant.  

Mountaintop International was a young organization when Trinity was first introduced to its work, says Rob Garris, Trinity’s managing director, Leadership Development. “But the Mountaintop team already had a track record of changing lives through education. Our decision to support their expansion was driven by our shared mission of empowering young faith leaders to transform their communities, and our confidence in their drive and vision.” 

The grant reflects one of the chief priorities of Trinity’s Leadership Development initiative: to provide established faith leaders with practical leadership and management skills to better address their communities’ needs. At a moment when the Anglican church is growing faster in Africa than anywhere else in the world, Trinity’s partnership with Mountaintop focuses on supporting emerging Anglican leaders across the continent. 

With Trinity’s grant, Mountaintop was able to provide intensive leadership development resources for Mercy and the five other recipients of the 2025 Mountaintop Anglican Fellowship. In addition to financial assistance for recipient-led projects like Climate Girls Win, the Fellows receive specialized training in leadership and fundraising via Trinity’s free online curriculum, Faith Leadership Campus, regular one-on-one mentorship with relevant experts, and personalized discipleship to help them find strength for their work through their faith. Mountaintop Anglican Fellows also participate in a two-week Leadership Institute, which last July was held at the Harvard University Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in 2026 will take place at USIU-Africa in Nairobi, Kenya. 

Mountaintop International founder and CEO Reed Shafer-Ray describes his organization’s partnership with Trinity as “catalytic.” The church’s support, he says, “has allowed us to deepen the leadership formation of courageous Anglican social entrepreneurs working on some of the world'’s most pressing issues in some of the world’s lowest-income countries. Because of Trinity, we’ve been able to walk alongside these spiritual leaders as they strengthen their faith, build the knowledge and relationships needed to elevate their work, and transform their communities one person at a time.” 

Another 2025 Mountaintop Anglican Fellow, James Otai, says the fellowship has “strengthened my self-awareness, clarifying the core beliefs and values that guide my leadership.” The focus of his work is lifting rural women in Uganda out of subsistence businesses “that perpetuate poverty and dependency: trading in small agricultural goods, crafts, or informal services without the tools or pathways to grow,” he says. The organization he cofounded to break this cycle is called Imagine Her;  Otai says the fellowship has dramatically boosted his group’s efforts to help rural women entrepreneurs “gain integrated access to capacity, capital, and ecosystems — not just to build businesses but to dismantle the very systems that perpetuate poverty.” 

A third Mountaintop Anglican Fellow, Esther Ajudeonu, says she is “driven by a deep understanding of the challenges African youths face, having navigated the same struggles myself.” While growing up in Nigeria, Ajudeonu says, she had limited access to education, economic opportunity, and — crucially — the guidance of mentors who, by sharing wisdom and skills, provide a model for how she and others in her community might realize their full potential. Connecting the next generation of African youth to individual mentors is at the core of the Primacy Youth Development Initiative, the platform she founded in 2023 to provide young people with skills-based education, communications tools, financial literacy, and other resources vital to self-empowerment.  

For Ajudeonu, whose project’s impact has been felt across more than 40 African nations, participation in the fellowship has underscored the relationship between her faith and her work. “It’s given me a deeper understanding of my purpose and values,” she says. “The emphasis on faith and personal growth has enabled me to cultivate resilience, compassion, and humility — all essential qualities for effective leadership.”  

Ajudeonu has also benefited from the relationships she has formed with Mountaintop’s staff and the other Anglican Fellows. She values being “part of a community — which means I don’t have to walk my leadership journey alone,” she says.  

The word fellowship has multiple meanings, and the 2025 Anglican Fellows exemplify all of them, according to Unnati Joshi, Mountaintop International’s program manager.  “What stands out about this group is how they show up for one another,” she says. “They learn in partnership, promote each other’s work, and invite emerging leaders from their communities into Mountaintop virtual events, modeling leadership rooted in service, compassion, and long-term commitment.” 

As the 2025 Anglican Fellows complete the program, the new year brings a new cohort of six leaders, each fueled by the same combination of faith in God and deep dedication to service. Last year, Trinity’s Leadership Development team renewed its grant to Mountaintop, enabling these six new fellows to receive the professional development training needed to bring their projects to fruition and transform the future of their communities. The renewed grant goes further still, supporting Mountaintop’s efforts to establish a sustainability plan for continued work with the Anglican Communion and to digitize its curriculum, allowing the organization to reach many more Anglican leaders in years to come.  

Meanwhile, in Namawanga village, Naburefe Joan and her Climate Girls Win group are busy planting indigenous and fruit tree species that will restore green cover, protect the soil from erosion, provide shade and — soon — bear fresh fruit for students and their family members to eat. Musingo Mercy notes that Joan’s tree-planting campaign has recently expanded to incorporate regular community clean-up efforts and other sustainability initiatives. Significantly, she says, it has also “changed the community’s perception of women as climate leaders, and increased trust in and support for women taking up climate action.” There and elsewhere that the Mountaintop Anglican Fellows have made an impact, progress has taken root.  

Top image: Mountaintop Anglican Fellow Musingo Mercy (center, in green) equips young women in eastern Uganda with the skills to build climate-resilient communities.