Arts Paper | Arts Council of Greater New Haven

West River Water Festival Fêtes New Haven's Overlooked Waterways

Written by Olivia Tapia Ko | Jul 16, 2025 4:00:00 AM

Ten-year-old Kahea Levita. 

Ten-year-old Kahea Levita looked through her binoculars just in time to see a seagull, determined in its pursuit of a small crab in the water. The seagull swooped down and snapped up the crab, before disappearing into the sky, its mission complete.

These kinds of happenings are the natural beauty of New Haven’s overlooked waterways.

Last Saturday, Kahea was one of many participants in the now-annual West River Water Festival at the Barnard Nature Center at 200 Derby Rd., as people gathered to eat, ride canoes, and learn about their local environmental groups and surroundings. Roughly three dozen attended.

The West River Water Festival is an annual event on the West River featuring birdwatching, free canoe rides, food, and visitors from local environmental organizations. This year’s organizations included Save the Sound, the Nature Conservancy, and City of New Haven Peace Commission. Some, like Save the Sound, have been in partnership with the event’s founder, Doreen Abubukar, for years.

Doreen Abubukar. “I felt that New Haven is very unique being an urban watershed,” she said. 

Abubukar is a self-described urban environmentalist and founder of the Community Placemaking Engagement Network (CPEN). She founded the West River Water Festival in 2011, and it has grown from a very small event (“Water in buckets” she said), to the lively celebration that it is today. It continues to grow each year.

“I felt that New Haven is very unique being an urban watershed,” Abubukar said when asked what inspired her to start this event, “And there are Black and Brown people who live around the river who have never experienced the river.”

Abubukar wanted to give locals an opportunity to grow more in touch with their disregarded waterways, and has clearly done so with this festival. Each environmental organization set up its own booth. Attendees went around from table to table, engaging, making art, and learning and connecting with.

Lys Gant of Save the Sound. 

That day, Save the Sound was represented by Watershed Stewardship Coordinator Lys Gant, at a table with offerings ranging from rubber stamps (created by Gant themselves and depicting local and endangered water species) to informational pamphlets about the organization itself.

“We are happy to come and share our message.” Gant said of Save the Sound’s partnership with Abubukar and CPEN. Save the Sound is a Long Island Sound based nonprofit with a base in New York state, as well as one in New Haven, that specializes in green infrastructure, monitoring water quality, dam removals, and overall protecting the Long Island Sound. Its goals and morals very much align with the mission of this festival.

Partnership and collaboration seemed to be a big theme in this festival, as was seen in an interview with ecologist Sophie Duncan, who had been volunteering with Abubukar for years. The two met through the Nature Conservancy around 2021, and have continued to work together since.

Sophie Duncan: “What if the West River was this busy every Saturday?”

“You have the vision, and I’ll show up to help,” said Duncan, expressing their faith in Abubukar and CPEN, as they stacked the coloring sheets they made for the festival. The coloring sheets feature an osprey, a local bird to the nature center. “It's incredible to see what Doreen and CPEN have done here.”

Duncan also mentioned that this water festival opens the door for more people to learn about the river and its inhabitants year round, after seeing how interesting it is during the festival.

“What if the West River was this busy every Saturday?”

This article comes from the 2025 cohort of the Youth Arts Journalism Initiative (YAJI). YAJI is a program in which New Haven, Hamden and West Haven Public Schools high school students pitch, write, edit and publish articles through the Arts Paper. This year, YAJI advisors include Arts Paper Editor Lucy Gellman and reporter and YAJI alum Abiba Biao. Olivia Tapia Ko is a rising sophomore at New Haven Academy.