Training Our Leaders

Water Watchers runs trainings for grassroots leaders working on water, environmental, and social justice issues in their communities. Trainings include introductions to core campaign organizing principles, community mobilization, meaningfully embedding Indigenous solidarity, and designing strategic interventions to win for people and planet. 

Training Offerings

Amplifying Local Issues

Beyond trainings, we offer grassroots movements access to our digital advocacy tools to help local leaders reach their community and streamline the process for reaching key decision-makers. We also amplify local actions to our network to supercharge the grassroots movements working on the frontlines of water justice issues around the Great Lakes.

Amplify Your Issue

Supporting Campaigns

Water Watchers' expert campaign advisement and support services help clarify goals, strategies, and tactics to ensure campaigns are reaching the right people at the right time in the most impactful way. Whether it's at a critical juncture in a campaign or a group is just not having success reaching key decision-makers on their issue, we can give your campaign new life.

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Say No to TC Energy’s Proposed Pumped Storage Project

For generations, Georgian Bay has been a place where people live, work, raise families, and go to find a connection to the water and landscapes around them. In 2019, a group of residents gathered in Meaford after learning about a proposed pumped storage project on the shores of the Bay, within the Georgian Bay UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve and on the Niagara Escarpment. More than 90% of those who attended expressed concerns. What began as a group of neighbours coming together to learn more grew into Save Georgian Bay (SGB), a 100% volunteer-driven organization. For more than six years, SGB volunteers have continued to research the project, organize their community, gather thousands of petition signatures, and press municipal, provincial and federal decision-makers to stop the proposed pumped storage project.

Today, more than six years later, the project sits at a critical juncture. TC Energy is proposing a $7-10 billion open-loop pumped storage facility at the 4th Canadian Division Training Centre in Meaford. The project would carve a roughly 375-acre reservoir into the Niagara Escarpment and connect it to Georgian Bay through massive tunnels. The site contains habitat for more than 36 Species at Risk and has a history of military live-fire training, raising contamination concerns. Once operational, the facility would pump approximately 23 billion litres of Georgian Bay water — and anything in it — through the system every day, for decades. For the people who have spent years protecting this place, the scale of what is being proposed is enormous, and the potential consequences reach far beyond the project site.

What happens in Georgian Bay will set a precedent for how Canada's public lands and waters are managed. We do not need this project, and we cannot afford to put our water, our environment, and billions in public funds at risk when better energy alternatives are available.

You can help Save Georgian Bay, the communities around Georgian Bay, and the plants and animals that depend on these waters by taking action today to tell Minister McGuinty to refuse TC Energy access to CFB Meaford for the proposed Pumped Storage Project.

Take action here!