The show must go on! Water Docs Film Festival needs your support to stay afloat.

Film submissions for the 2020 Water Docs Film Festival are now open - but we’re in danger of not being able to cover the costs necessary to mount the festival on schedule. We urgently need the support of our dedicated community to ensure that the 2020 Water Docs Film Festival takes place next March.

After 20 years of dedication to delivering the most in-depth and cutting edge water education and arts programs, we now need to ask for our community’s support at this critical time in our organization’s history. Unlike most other non-profit and charitable organizations, this is the first time we have been in a position where we’ve needed to ask for our community’s help and support. We are asking for it now.

Ecologos, the charitable organization that brings you the Water Docs Film Festival , Water Docs @ School Action Projects and Water Docs Where-You-Live Community Screenings has run into a funding gap that, unless filled, will inhibit our ability to prepare for the 2020 film festival. We need to raise 25K by the end of September to cover our costs and ensure that the show goes on!

People are now waking up to the devastating reality of the climate crisis, and as many of you know, the way we treat water is at the heart of this crisis. As an organization that has dedicated 20 years to helping people connect with water in order to inspire action to protect it, we need our community’s help to continue performing this important role in promoting water awareness and education.

THE PROBLEM: 

In May and June each year, when the extensive costs for our annual Water Docs Film Festival have been covered, the Ecologos bank account dips to a low point. Over the past several years, we have received support to carry us through this critical funding stage in our calendar year, allowing us time to build up our other funding sources which usually come in as grants in the late fall. Unfortunately, this has not been the case this year.

If we are not able to bridge this funding gap in order to cover the operating costs involved in preparing for our annual event, we will have to cancel the 2020 film festival . Taking into consideration the recent strides made by Greta Thunberg’s global Friday’s 4 Future movement and the incredible acts of civil disobedience being performed worldwide by groups like Extinction Rebellion, we too are planning something incredible for the 2020 festival - but we need your help to make it a reality.

I AGREE, THE SHOW MUST GO ON!  BUT HOW CAN I HELP?

If each one of our supporters contributes the cost of a latte to this campaign, we will sail through our 25K goal in no time and the film festival will continue making huge waves for water protection. Please take a look at our generous list of perks and support Ecologos today.

Share the campaign! Please share our fundraiser on your social media channels and tag Water Docs Film Festival on Facebook, Twitter & Instagram and use the hashtags #KeepWDAfloat and #ActionForWater. Go one step further and share with friends, family and colleagues in an email or talk to them about it in person.

No other film festival in Canada brings together so many water educators, activists, artists, organizations and protectors into one space to raise awareness and inspire action to protect water. 

Please help us keep the 2020 Water Docs Film Festival afloat!

ECOLOGOS PROGRAM HIGHLIGHTS:

Check out some of the amazing things we’ve accomplished to raise awareness for water over the last 20 years:

• The Water Docs Film Festival has been running successfully for 8 years, growing each year to bring water issues to wider, more diverse audiences. Beginning as a small event inside a community centre in 2012 with 50-100 attendees, the festival quickly overflowed to larger venues across the city like the AGO and Daniel’s Spectrum. Over the last few years, the Water Docs Film Festival has found a home at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema, a 650 seat venue.

• Water Docs @ School Action Projects has been running successfully for 6 years (2014-2019) and is a finely crafted, one-of-a-kind environmental education program offered through a partnership between Ecologos and Learning for a Sustainable Future (LSF). An 8-month long learning and action program for Ontario Grade 7 and 8 students, Water Docs @ School delivers the entire curriculum on water, cultivates a deep caring for the environment and helps develop skills in leadership, team-building, project management and filmmaking. Over the past six years in schools across the GTHA and beyond, WD@S has engaged 200 Grade 7 and 8 classes and 5,000 students in this extraordinary learning opportunity.

•   Water Docs Where-You-Live Community Screenings has been running successfully for 4 years (2016-2019) and is our solution to the fact that the film festival only takes place once a year, in one city. Water Docs Where-You-Live allows anyone to select any film(s) previously shown at our festival and host their own screening, sharing their passion for water issues and love of film with their community. With this program, people are empowered to take water education outside of cinema walls, making waves in communities across Canada. Water Docs Where-You-Live screenings have been held in public libraries, community centres, universities and shared by many, many passionate individuals of all backgrounds and in places ranging from Toronto to Mattawa, and from Etobicoke to North Bay.

• Over the years, Ecologos has become increasingly interested in how all the arts can help connect people to water issues and inspire communities to take action for their local waterways. From the crafting of our Water Warrior Award to immersion in virtual reality experiences and 3-D auditory spaces to live music and pop-up galleries, we now incorporate a variety of arts into The Water Docs Film Festival every year as a way of reaching beyond film while also supporting local artists. 

• Our first ever outdoor screening took place at the R.C. Harris Water Filtration Plant in 2018 between the gorgeous Art Deco building to the north and our beautiful Lake Ontario to the south. We shared an important message about climate change with our audience by screening Beyond Crisis and holding a post-screening Q&A session with the film's director Kai Reimer-Watts. We are looking forward to repeating this event in the near future with our partners CUPE and the City of Toronto.

• Ecologos was a co-founding partner of The Great Lakes Water Walk in 2017 . This special event, led by Anishinaabe water walkers, brought together Indigenous and non-Indigenous people to celebrate the cross-cultural connection to the sacredness of water. Many hundreds gathered to traverse Toronto's waterfront from the east and the west, culminating in a blessing of the waters led by First Nations Elders and others. This walk of celebration, reconciliation and hope was created through our partnership with the Peterborough-based group Nibi Emosaawdamajig (Those Who Walk with The Water) .

• Stop the Mega-Quarry in 2013, brought together Ecologos, the North Dufferin Agricultural and Community Task Force and Citizens Alliance United for a Sustainable Environment to help stop the opening of North America's second-largest open pit gravel mine. The proposal covered 2,300 acres of Ontario’s best farmland, and would have blasted deeper than the Niagara Gorge beneath the water table at the headwaters of five Ontario river systems, serving over a million people. Tens of thousands protested, forcing the withdrawal of the proposition and the government to rethink the land's use.

• Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream occurred when Ecologos helped bring this thought-provoking symposium from the Pachamama Alliance to Ontario communities in 2011. The inspiring half-day event employed lively discussion, personal reflection, and powerful videos to ask: Where are we at? As a people and a society? How did we get here? What's possible for the future? What are the first steps we can take? This effort later became the Up to Us program and formed the basis of a documentary film. 

• Water Hour in 2010 was a  pioneering social media campaign, wherein thousands shared their water stories, exceeding all expectations for reach, participation and feedback. Water Hour was an essential precursor to more ambitious public-engagement programs to follow, such as the Water Docs Film Festival.

The Ecologos Environmental Organization is a registered Canadian charity #877193821RR0001