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Streams Community Hub marks 10 years with live telethon fundraiser

September 24, 2026   ·   0 Comments

By Joshua Drakes, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Streams Community Hub is turning back the clock on fundraising as it celebrates a decade of providing arts programming for youth in Shelburne.

The local arts charity will mark its 10th anniversary with a three-hour live telethon on Oct. 6 from 6 to 9 p.m., bringing together performances, stories, prizes and fundraising as Streams looks back on its first decade and prepares for the next.

Andrew James, co-founder and chair of Streams, said that the telethon will be broadcast through Rogers Dufferin and streamed online, allowing viewers beyond Shelburne to participate in the anniversary celebration.

“This telethon is first a snapshot,” he said. “It’s a look back at 10 years of creativity and community and connection –– all the amazing things that we’ve been doing over the last 10 years –– from being in schools to opening this facility here, after-school programs and workshops, and all the different events that we do.”

Rather than hosting a traditional gala, Streams co-founder and executive director Juli-Anne James wanted an event that reflected the organization’s creative and youthful identity while allowing significantly more people to participate.

“We’re a creative arts charity,” she said. “We work with young people, and we serve young people, and our whole thing is the arts. So we specialize, I would say, in creativity. We always want to be different. We want to do something that people haven’t seen before, or in this case, haven’t seen in a long time. Putting a modern spin on an old sort of fundraising method.”

Juli-Anne James added, “Our organization’s identity is very youthful, very fun, very creative, and so we didn’t want to do just the mundane. We wanted to challenge ourselves to do something that would be creative, and that would put a smile on people’s faces and get them interacting with our work over the last decade.”

The broadcast will feature performances from Streams youth groups, including its Sing Club, alongside live painting, giveaways and pre-recorded segments featuring community members and alumni sharing their experiences with the organization. A live audience is also expected at the Streams facility.

Fundraising will be a major component of the evening, with Streams working toward a goal of securing 1,000 monthly donors contributing $10 each. The organization had reached approximately 99 monthly donors at the time of the interview.

Reaching the 1,000-donor goal would provide roughly one-third of Streams’ operating budget, creating a more reliable funding source for its programming.

“We’re asking for support and help so that we can continue to make it another 10 years and beyond here in the community,” Andrew James said. “Like Juli-Anne always says, we’re not looking for people to give more. We’re just looking for more people to give.”

“Doing this as an event that is a hybrid between in-person and online allows us to reach a much broader audience,” Juli-Anne James said. “We can reach potentially across Canada. We are confident that we will get to 1,000 monthly donors. We chose the specific goal because I think doing the math that represents about a third of our operating budget, and we are very much a scrappy grassroots organization. That is our core. That is our origin, and for us to be able to sustain this work for another decade, it’s going to take the power of the community.”

The telethon comes exactly a decade after Andrew and Juli-Anne founded Streams Community Hub in Shelburne.

Since 2016, the organization has grown from its early camps and programs into an established local arts hub serving young people through camps, workshops, after-school activities and other creative opportunities.

Over the decade, more than 1,800 children and youth have participated in Streams programming, a figure that the Jameses are proud of. It was their vision, achieved.

“If we didn’t imagine it, we wouldn’t be here,” Juli-Anne James said. “One of the things, though, that has been very surprising for us over the last maybe five years or so is how much people have responded in terms of finding a place of safety. For young people, especially, we set out to provide really engaging, really cool, really state of the art programming… But what we’ve heard young people say back to us is that they feel safe here, and so that has been really one of the things I’m most proud of.”

She continued, “When I reflect on the last 10 years, the byproduct of us setting out to do this and create this arts organization has meant that young people in this community who probably otherwise would not have been able to find it have found safety here.”

Some of the organization’s earliest participants are now returning as volunteers, facilitators and employees, creating what the founders describe as an ecosystem where young people can continue their involvement as they grow older.

The organization has also developed Town Tees, a social enterprise that provides employment opportunities for youth while helping financially support Streams’ work.

The Oct. 6 telethon aims to strengthen that foundation while introducing Streams to audiences who may not have encountered its work before.

Looking beyond the anniversary, Streams hopes to grow an endowment established with the Dufferin Community Foundation and eventually construct a purpose-built youth arts hub in Dufferin County, ideally in Shelburne.

Andrew and Juli-Anne James are also looking beyond Dufferin County, with a longer-term goal of bringing the Streams model to other rural communities across Ontario and eventually Canada.

For the last 10 years, however, the Jameses have said that they are immensely grateful to the community support that helped them launch their dream.

“Come to the Hub on Oct. 6, and continue to support us,” Andrew James said. “Thank you for the support. It has been great, great support, and it’s great to know when we look back, there are donors that have been with us from the beginning, and it just really touches our heart because they get it. They understand the value of the work that we’re doing and the impact that we’re making with the work that we’re doing.”

For Streams, the anniversary telethon serves as both a celebration of the thousands of young people who have passed through its programs and an opportunity to build the community support needed to carry that work into another decade.

For more information on Streams Community Hub, visit: streamshub.org

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