Caring for Water in Canada’s Lakes and Rivers

It’s all about water!  The one shared resource that’s a matter of life… and health.

The Need

The Water Trust was created to provide sustainable support for grassroots community organizations to help preserve and improve water quality in Canada’s waterways. Ready access to core funding will build local capacity and foster cooperative action over the long term for local volunteer-based or community groups, lake associations, regional networks, and Indigenous peoples.

Protecting our water is the challenge of the century. Fortunately, organizations best able to act are the hundreds of community organizations closest to those lakes and rivers across the country. These grassroots groups are ideally suited to perform the water work that needs to be done on an ongoing basis. Yet local non-profits, driven by capable volunteers, typically lack the financial capacity – core funding – for necessary operational costs, capital equipment, staffing and training.

While such organizations have some access to periodic, temporary funding, it usually comes at the cost of excessive volunteer hours to prepare applications - as well as the accompanying administrative burdens- which may burn out the volunteers in the process. Also, conforming to changing project funding criteria often leads to ‘mission drift’, diverting energy away from the focus on implementing what it’s all about - the crucial water programs!

How It Works

CSW is addressing this challenge through the use of its registered charity, which was specifically established to meet this need.  The incentive of charitable tax credits for pro-active work in the public interest should stimulate donations nationwide for such important local causes. The Water Trust will streamline administrative responsibilities while also ensuring accountability for water protection activities. It is intended to free environmental non-profits so they can focus on delivery of the water programs they are eager and ready to carry out.

Your charitable gift supports this mission!  The Water Trust at Centre for Sustainable Watersheds (CSW) is the most direct way to ensure action where it counts - at the grassroots level - lake to lake to lake.  It’s about time we started to put our resources where they can be of greatest usefulness.

The Works To Be Done

CSW’s solutions-based initiatives preserve/improve water quality by:

• engaging and supporting active community organizations
• developing Internet-based tools to share data and information
• advocating for natural, healthy shoreline environments
• preventing wastewater pollution with zero discharge technologies
• promoting best practices for everyone enjoying our waterways 

Activities would range widely. For example: a shoreline demo site on a Laurentian lake; fish habitat studies on the Winnipeg River; a Balsam Lake outreach brochure for anglers and boaters; a pilot wastewater installation on Okanagan Lake; water monitoring on the Annapolis River; an inter-lake workshop on water trends and data exchange in northern Saskatchewan.

CSW offers unique training support essential for community based organizations to carry out such programs and activities in their own locale. These volunteer-driven groups across the country, who know and love their environs best, are particularly suited to be the most effective voice to maintain our water resources.

You can help them! CSW’s The Water Trust offers the charitable channel for direct support to grassroots organizations doing this water work.

This is our water -– all there is -– was -– or ever will be.

Thank you for investing in our water’s future --- and our future’s water

Charitable Registration # 86355 5223 RR0001