Communities, managers, and policymakers need to increase knowledge and include Indigenous knowledge systems to make contextually robust decisions, especially within watershed planning and the management of aquatic resources. In 2019, the Commission of Water Resource Management identified two important issues associated with freshwater in Hawaiʻi. First, current water resource management practices alienate communities when decision-making is top-down. Second, there is a lack of reliable, long-term data to inform current and future stewardship of Hawaiʻi’s streams. In response to these issues, Nā Maka Onaona - a nonprofit dedicated to ʻĀina Momona (thriving communities of people and place) - is developing a stream monitoring toolkit for communities across Hawaiʻi. A variety of methodologies and tools included in the toolkit are meant to guide and facilitate actions focused on assessing and monitoring streams and rivers, while also growing a community’s ability and capacity to participate in and contribute to decision-making. The toolkit will be a resource to support communities in long-term data collection within a framework that is transferable among users, managers, and policymakers. The toolkit is being developed in four parts: (i) a literature review on stream monitoring protocols; (ii) interviews of experts and key users of water resources about current knowledge gaps in Hawaiʻi’s streams; (iii) case studies of stream monitoring programs throughout the Island of Kauaʻi; and (iv) field tests of a variety of tools to guide the building of a monitoring program and toolkit. With this information, users will be equipped to promptly monitor their waterway, grounded in Indigenous inquiries, and supported by contemporary technologies. In the medium-term, toolkit users will (re)strengthen intimate relationships with waterways across Hawaiʻi. In the long-term, this toolkit can sustain effective, proactive and inclusive decision-making in the future, and serve as a model for monitoring streams based on relationality frameworks globally.