Donate

Hillside is a registered charity!  Our registration number is 12949 3292 RR0001.

Hillside Festival happily accepts donations of any dollar amount (and we can accept e-transfers to [email protected] as well as donations through PayPal).  On this page are just a few of the initiatives you can choose to support.

Your donations help to stabilize our organization, keeping the brainstorming and planning going even in the snowiest or weirdest months of the year when lockdowns and Zoom meetings keep us working from home.

So, in donating to Hillside, you are backing an inspired and passionate group of people who care about culture and creativity and want to maintain a groundswell of interest in the power of art and music to unite people, educate them, entertain them, and keep them believing in our collective future.

Or scroll down for other initiatives and payment options.

Monthly Donations

Hillside runs year-round, and when we are not working at one of our two big festivals—Hillside Inside and the Summer Festival—we are planning them. Your monthly donations help to stabilize the organization, keeping the brainstorming and planning going even in the snowiest months of the year. Visit our PayPal page to set up recurring donations (choose Monthly or Yearly).

One-time Donations

Any size can make a difference.

One-time donations to help us flourish are also available.  Both at the height of summer and in the middle of winter, our not-for-profit charity creates festivals that bring innovative music, Indigenous drumming, children’s entertainment, environmental learning, and glorious food to thousands of people. At the festivals and during the rest of the year in local schools and at camps, we offer over 140 educational workshops in Indigenous culture, songwriting, peacemaking, health & wellness, and environmental projects.  We work with other festivals in our community, offering stimulating co-presentations across artistic genres, and we regularly donate tickets to community groups for their fundraising and outreach efforts.  (In 2019, we donated 133 tickets, which had a total value of $20,697.00.)  We are deeply embedded in our community, and we work passionately to inspire creativity and altruism, to ensure equality and peace, and to promote a resilient, affirmative approach to life. 

Girls & Guitars

Encourage a girl. Make her believe.

This project proceeds from our recognition that the music industry tends to be dominated by males who are typically the performers, agents, presenters, promoters, and critics of music.

  1. In-school seminars featuring singing and songwriting;
  2. Staged performances at Hillside’s summer and winter festivals; and
  3. A songwriting course

By placing female singer-songwriters in the schools who will teach children about the power of voice, of continued music practice, the importance of creativity for maintaining a healthy life, and how to write songs that move and inspire, we are hoping to make grassroots change among the upcoming generations.  Through our staged performances and our songwriting course, we want to encourage artists of all ages to be heard, loudly and clearly, because equality is not only a central feature of our vision, it is fundamental to peace, liberty, and fair opportunity in our world.  


Indigenous Circle

Commit to education. Commit to peace.

Another in-the-schools program that Hillside offers involves one-hour sessions for elementary and high-school students led by an Anishinaabe storyteller. These sessions allow students to understand more about Indigenous culture through drumming and storytelling circles that use instruments and talismans to teach the mores of Indigenous peoples. Through this program, students become more knowledgeable about Canadian culture, the fabric of which is comprised of the belief systems of many honourable peoples. The cosmology of Indigenous peoples sees humans as a constitutive part of the land, which is viewed as a spiritual being rather than a material fact. The drum is “the heartbeat of the earth” and the mallets are “Grandmother’s arms.” There are myths and stories that birthed the rituals of the drum and give meaning to the music.  These sessions teach children about the seasons, the elements, and the directions so that they better understand how this way of understanding the world differs from the Western tradition and how they can be mutually supportive so that we can better prepare our children to be informed peacemakers and empathic community-builders.

Green Initiatives

Plant courage. Harness hope.

In past years, we have raised money that went directly to the creation of a pedal-powered stage in the Children’s Area, for example. The Rainbow Stage in this area has amps and speakers and microphones and lights—like any of our other four stages—but we wanted to power that technical production using bicycles that generate and store energy. This way, Hillsiders not only got to participate in the creation of the sounds and lights of the stage by pedaling the bicycles, but they also got to do so in an environmentally-conscious way that helped to shrink our carbon footprint. This initiative was part of the larger greening of our festival that has been underway since 1984 and includes such ventures as dishwashing (we don’t have any throwaway dishes on site), free water, the digging of compost pits on-site, tree planting, and the shuttle bus which runs back and forth from downtown Guelph to Guelph Lake Island during the festival.


If you’d like to donate to one of these causes—or to just help subsidize the “madness” of our community festival—kindly use the buttons above to visit our donation pages. If you would like your donation to go toward a specific cause (other than the ones listed here), please email our Executive Director, Kate Johnston ([email protected]). Kate will be happy to channel your enthusiasm to the right budget line.

Scroll to Top