The Haliburton-Muskoka-Kawartha Children's Water Festival is the primary program of the charity Friends of Ecological and Environmental Learning (FEEL), based out of Haliburton, Ontario.

Mission statement: The Haliburton-Muskoka-Kawartha Children's Water Festival (hmwaterfestival.ca) inspires children in our region to become wise stewards of water and related systems through educational and fun hands-on activities.

For 19 years, the Haliburton-Muskoka-Kawartha Children’s Water Festival (HMK Children’s Water Festival or HMKCWF) has been a free-to-access outdoor event which actively inspires and teaches elementary students about water ecology and stewardship in their homes, classrooms, and communities. Since 2005, thousands of children and their teachers have attended a ‘day camp’ annual event to learn about the valuable natural resource, water! Children have fun while engaging in experiential learning, visiting 40-50 interactive, hands-on activity stations where they learn about all things water, while making ecological connections to the natural world around them.  In more recent years we have developed new climate change related activities and a Water Heroes website and programs  (waterheroes.ca) encouraging stewardship in follow-up to the festival.

The  Covid pandemic brought a re-awakening to our Water Festival programming and we have pivoted to offer more resources on our website for teachers and families to engage in hands-on water stewardship activities at home and in school yards.  We are also making activity centres we've developed for our Fall Festival available at public and partnered outdoor events in the region. Keeping our programming free to access is crucial to addressing economic barriers that families in our area face and also overcome challenge of the regional school board no longer being able to fund our programs directly.   Every donation helps keep our programs accessible.

We are partnering with public and private schools, libraries, lake associations and other groups to offer hybrid programs to help overcome geographic barriers and lack of opportunities for enhanced educational offerings in our rural region. Program adaptations of our HMK Children’s Water Festival will increase the representation of a diversity of peoples, including our Indigenous partners.

Our dream is to mobilize our activity centres, allowing our programming to be accessible to more children and thereby increasing our educational outreach for the betterment of our precious waterways.

Please help us adapt and sustain these important opportunities for our children and communities. Any amount of financial aid directly supports the positive impact education has on motivating children to become wise Water Heroes!