On a Saturday afternoon in early October, the gym and grounds of Greenvale Park Elementary School will fill with the sounds of a community festival: the shuffle of lotería cards, the chatter of families browsing a local makers' market, and the rumble of the Northfield Public Library's bookmobile pulling into the lot. The occasion is Nuestra Agua, Nuestras Vidas -- "Our Water, Our Lives" -- a free, family-friendly celebration built especially for young children and Spanish-speaking families. It runs from 2 to 3 p.m. on October 3, 2026, at 500 Lincoln Parkway.
The event is hosted by Clean River Partners, a grassroots environmental nonprofit rooted in the Cannon River watershed, together with HealthFinders Collaborative and the City of Northfield. Alongside the market and the bookmobile, attendees will find hands-on activities, educational booths, and a mascot with a mission: Miguel, a mudpuppy charged with protecting the Cannon River.
The mudpuppy is a fitting mascot for the work. Necturus maculosus is a fully aquatic salamander that keeps its external gills for life, spending its days under rocks and logs in rivers and lakes across eastern North America. It is the kind of creature that thrives only where the water is clean enough to support it -- a living reminder of what the festival is really about.
That mission has deep roots in Northfield. Clean River Partners began in 1990 as the Cannon River Watershed Partnership. The organization started with a single part-time executive director, then grew to a three-person staff that held public meetings, gathered community input, and drafted a long-term watershed plan. Its board drew county commissioners from six counties -- Dakota, Goodhue, Le Sueur, Rice, Steele, and Waseca -- along with representatives from soil and water conservation districts, an arrangement that built strong government partnerships even as it made for a crowded table.
One of the group's first signature efforts was Adopt-A-River, which invited residents to take responsibility for stretches of river and shoreline, keeping them clean while watching for erosion and illegal dump sites. In the summer of 1997, the partnership began sharing information about new sewer projects in Dundas and Welch designed to stop raw sewage from flowing into the Cannon. The organization kept the Cannon River Watershed Partnership name until 2021, when it rebranded as Clean River Partners. Today it describes itself as a membership organization that has worked for more than 35 years to protect the watershed, which spans more than 1,400 square miles across southeastern Minnesota.
Nuestra Agua, Nuestras Vidas grew out of that community-engagement tradition, but with a specific aim: reaching the region's Latine residents, who have historically been left out of conversations about water. A previous edition of the festival, held in Northfield's Bridge Square, was organized around exactly that goal -- fostering a deeper connection with the local Latine community, raising awareness about water issues, and empowering residents to advocate for improvements to their drinking water and local waterways.
The stations at that earlier festival hint at what families can expect this fall. A stormwater and recreation booth used an interactive fishing game to teach how pollution reaches rivers. A water conservation station asked attendees to think about the extremes of too much and too little water and to contribute to a collaborative mural led by local artist Rocky Casillas Aguirre. At a drinking water station, residents learned about Northfield's tap water and offered feedback on the city's proposed drinking water treatment plant -- a project that has been the subject of extended public debate, including a City Council work session in early 2025. Food came from El Triunfo, a beloved local Mexican restaurant, and artists from Mercado Local displayed and sold home goods, stickers, and other wares.
The choice of Greenvale Park Elementary as this year's venue is no accident. The school sits near St. Olaf College in a residential neighborhood surrounded by green space, and it is home to the Greenvale Park Community School, which provides free out-of-school-time programming for neighborhood students and families. The school also offers Compañeros, Northfield's two-way Spanish immersion program, in which students in grades 1 through 5 spend half their day learning in English and half in Spanish. The program is offered at all three of the district's elementary schools -- Bridgewater, Greenvale Park, and Spring Creek -- and it makes the school a natural gathering place for the bilingual families the festival hopes to reach.
The school grounds themselves reflect the same ethic. The Greenvale Park Lone Oak Nature Area features trees, shrubs, and plants native to Minnesota, along with a butterfly garden where students watch metamorphosis up close. Carleton College has supported the festival as part of its Cannon River learning initiatives, describing the event as public outreach on native plants important to water, climate, and health, delivered through activities for kids and their families at Greenvale Elementary.
The pairing of a river-protection nonprofit with HealthFinders Collaborative is deliberate. HealthFinders provides quality, accessible, and culturally appropriate health care at no cost to low-income and uninsured residents of greater Rice County, operating clinics in Faribault and Dundas with administrative offices in Northfield. Its presence at a water festival reflects a simple truth the organizers keep returning to: clean water is a health issue, and the people most affected by contaminated wells and polluted rivers are often the ones with the least power to demand change.
That is the thread running through the whole afternoon. A local market supports neighborhood makers. A bookmobile puts books in children's hands. Lotería turns a table game into a shared language. Educational booths explain stormwater and conservation. And somewhere in the crowd, a mudpuppy mascot named Miguel stands in for a river that cannot speak for itself.
Everything is free and open to all. Families are invited to come support local makers, learn practical ways to care for water, and connect with their neighbors -- and to keep an eye out for Miguel along the way.