World Environment Day Festival Draws 300 Community Members to Celebrate Environmental Action
World Environment Day Festival Murwillumbah - 18 years on
Capacity building
The issue
World Environment Day is celebrated internationally on 5 June each year as the United Nations’ principal vehicle for encouraging awareness and action for environmental protection. The Murwillumbah festival extends this celebration locally each year, highlighting the Northern Rivers’ extraordinary biodiversity and the community’s commitment to its protection. Up until this year the festival has been run by Caldera Environment Centre – a well-known volunteer-run environmental organisation in the Tweed region who advocates on matters of environmental significance in the Tweed, and which Tweed Landcare have held a close relationship with for many years now. Like many aging volunteer-run organisations, Caldera Environment Centre has been finding it harder as the years go by to run the annual World Environment Day Festival in Murwillumbah on the backs of their volunteers, all while keeping their organisation alive. Some of these organisational capacity related struggles meant that the 2024 festival did not go ahead. Caldera Environment Centre found themselves in need of extra help if they were to continue providing the World Environment Day Festival to Murwillumbah and to put on the festival for 2025.
The solution
Partnerships and a deeper appreciation of what motivates and sustains volunteers.
Tweed Landcare stepped in to help Caldera Environment Centre to bring back the World Environment Day Festival to the Tweed for 2025! And what a come back it was! Two grassroots environmental organisations helped each other to survive and thrive. Tweed Landcare took on the challenge to bring back this well-known community-led festival to the Tweed community - to educate and inspire local environmental action. Partnering with volunteers to run projects in Landcare is not always all rosy, and requires not only project management skills, but a deeper understanding of what motivates and sustains volunteer-led action in order to see projects genuinely succeed. Tweed Landcare’s partnership journey with Caldera Environment Centre to run World Environment Day Festival in the Tweed required a range of volunteer engagement skills in addition to organisational skills, including:
- building trust and relationships
- empathy and an understanding of volunteer motivations
- consistent volunteer appreciation and recognition
- transparent communication and feedback
- conflict resolution
The impact
Hundreds attended the festival on the 13 July 2025, for the 18th World Environment Day Festival in Murwillumbah, bringing together families, environmental advocates, and community members for a day of environmental education, action, and celebration. Expert speakers addressed critical environmental challenges, including Griffith University on climate adaptation efforts in the Northern Rivers, Southern Cross University on fighting our plastic pollution crisis, Bird language specialists discussed the region's unique biodiversity, others highlighted the incredible value of forest conservation. With Tweed Landcare’s support, Caldera Environment Centre was able to resurrect an annual regional festival vital for maintaining and sustaining environmental awareness and action and realised the power of partnerships in injecting new life to old traditions. World Environment Day festival planning showed off Landcare coordinators' unique skills as change makers at a local level - to seamlessly marry a structured approach of project management with a more nuanced people-centric approach required to lead and inspire unpaid contributors to care for our environment.
Key facts
- Landcare's partnerships require deep appreciation of what motivates and sustains volunteer action in addition to project management skills.