🎵 Benefit Concert for Venezuela 🏘️ $1 Land, 20 Homes 🔬 Lab for Rent 🏃 Run the Pen 📅 Events | 🔦 July 20, 2026

Local Spotlight

🔦 The Streets She Grew Up On Are Gone: Gia Nahmens Is Bringing Kingston Together for Venezuela

Kingston & Area Local News

🏘️ Kingston Sells 367 Gore Road for $1 and Gets 20 Affordable Homes Out of It
🔬 A Lab Bench You Can Actually Rent: The Helix Wet Lab Opens at Providence Care

Community Champions

🎮 A Neuro-Inclusive Video Game Club Just Won Awesome Kingston's July $1,000
⛵ Fifty Years On, Sandy Riley Still Resails His Kingston Olympic Races

New Events In and Around Kingston

🎵 FEATURED EVENT: One Ground One Sound, a Benefit for Venezuela | The Spire | July 27
🏃 9RUNRUN: Run the Pen | Lake Ontario Park | October 10
🤿 Meet a Scuba Diver, TD Summer Reading Club | Gananoque Public Library | July 22
🎪 Six Free Reasons to Be Downtown Every Week | Springer Market Square, Confederation Park & Battery Park | to August 30
🏛️ Historic Places Days: Five Days Left to Play Tourist at Home | Kingston area historic sites | to July 25
🛋️ Meet Me at the Commons: A Car-Free Street With a Full Schedule | Sydenham St between Princess and Queen | to August 28

Events Calendar

It’s gotten too long to include here in the summary! Click Events Calendar to see our list for the next few days.

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Most drone pilots need two months notice. Paul needs five days.

Aanii Nichii means "Hello, Friend," and that's how Paul Carl runs Aanii Nichii Drones. His Standing SFOC for advertised events means your festival or fundraiser isn't waiting on a month of paperwork, and his award-winning aerial work covers Kingston and area.

Missed it the first time? Read our full spotlight on Paul and Aanii Nichii Drones.

That is the flag of Venezuela at the top of this issue, and there is a Kingston reason it is flying here. Two earthquakes, thirty-nine seconds apart, took the coast Gia Nahmens grew up on, so she asked Kingston's musicians to play, and in about three weeks a remarkable lineup said yes. What we did not expect to learn is that this is the second time that coast has been taken from her. And the thing Gia most wants Kingston to understand has nothing to do with the music. It is arithmetic, and it starts at twenty dollars. Read the full story.

Twenty affordable homes for a dollar. That is the deal Kingston just made: the City sold 367 Gore Road, a surplus lot valued at about $1.2 million, to Brauer Homes for a single loonie, and in return Brauer is putting up ten triplexes and ten modular homes that have to stay affordable rentals for at least 25 years from the day the final occupancy permit is issued. Butternut Creek runs close by, so only 1.18 acres actually changed hands and the rest stays untouched. Council pointed to Brauer's three decades of building experience, and Mayor Bryan Paterson figures this is where home building in Kingston is headed.

Read the full story at: Kingston Daily

A startup with a good idea and nowhere to do the science is a startup that moves away, so Providence Care and Kingston Economic Development built the fix and cut the ribbon on Thursday, July 16. The Helix Wet Lab is 1,000 square feet of Biosafety Level 2 certified space on the hospital's second floor, for now the region's only one, stocked with the biosafety cabinets, incubators and centrifuges nobody launching a company can afford to buy. The pitch is refreshingly plain: rent a bench. Toronto's Argan Biomedical Technologies is moving in with a gel that has reversed Type 1 diabetes in mice, and Queen's researchers will chase personalized autism treatments down the hall. "I feel like this is brimming with possibilities here," said Mayor Bryan Paterson. "This is Kingston at its best."

Read the full story at: Providence Care and Kingstonist

Awesome Kingston gives away $1,000 a month, no strings attached, and July's went to Digital Adventures, which is building a neuro-inclusive video game club for youth aged 11 to 18 in the Kingston area. The idea is a room where they can do something they already love and find people who get it. Here is the part we love: the trustees are volunteers who each chip in $100 to make up the grant, and venues are donated, so every dollar collected lands in the winner's hands. July's pitch party was at the coworking space at 945 Princess. They run the third Thursday of the month, and with no August party, applications roll to September.

Read the full story at: Awesome Foundation, Kingston

Sunday, July 19 marked fifty years since a 25-year-old law student named Sandy Riley won the opening race of the Olympic Finn class right here on Lake Ontario, beating the three men who would go on to take the gold, the silver and the bronze. Riley had come to Kingston in 1968 for a Queen's degree, played Junior B hockey, and understood the local wind better than anyone in the fleet. Then came race two: a false start he insists was by inches in the fog, his result scrubbed, first place to thirteenth. He describes sailing a Finn as playing chess while doing sit-ups. Fifty years, a distinguished law career and an Order of Canada later, he still wakes having resailed the whole regatta overnight, and he is coming back to Kingston for the anniversary.

Read the full story at: The Kingston Whig-Standard

An amazing lineup of musicians, pulled together by one local who grew up on the Venezuelan coast the June 24 earthquakes destroyed, all donating their time so we get an easy way to help. That is One Ground One Sound: Monday, July 27, at The Spire, 82 Sydenham Street, tickets $20. The Levon Ichkhanian Group headlines, with Geoffrey Sirett, Larissa Koniuk, Gisèle Dalbec-Szczesniak, Jill Vitols, Anna Sudac, Mauricio Montecinos and Tim Stiff on the bill, and more guests still to be announced. Because nobody on that stage is being paid, every dollar goes to Ventura Orbit and the children and women hit by the quakes. They are collecting money, not goods. Grab your tickets at Donorbox.

How often do you get to run through Kingston Penitentiary? The new 10K at the second annual 9RUNRUN routes runners straight through the grounds of the historic pen, which is exactly why the organizers call it Run the Pen. It starts and finishes at Lake Ontario Park on Saturday, October 10, with a 2K family run and a 5K alongside it. The money goes to Victim Services of Kingston and Frontenac, the 24/7 team that turns up beside police, fire and paramedics on somebody's worst day. Choose the Green Bib and $5 of your fee goes straight to them. Register at Race Roster, and 5K and 10K entries come with a limited edition cap while quantities last.

This year's TD Summer Reading Club theme is water, so the Gananoque Public Library is doing the gloriously obvious thing and bringing in an actual scuba diver. On Wednesday, July 22 at the library, 100 Park Street, kids get to meet one, gear and all, and ask the questions you can only really ask somebody who spends their spare time underwater. Free, and exactly the sort of thing that turns a summer reading list into an actual summer. Details on Facebook.

Downtown Kingston already gets plenty of ink elsewhere, and we tend to point our spotlight at the corners that do not, so we have been quiet on this one. But an entire week of free things all summer is too good not to share. Tuesdays are Salsa in the Square, beginner lessons first, dancing after. Wednesdays are Games in the Square: giant Snakes and Ladders, chess, cornhole, UNO. Thursdays the library runs Stories in the Square at the amphitheatre. Live 365 puts live music in Springer Market Square and Confederation Park every Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. Most Saturdays, Chef Demos from downtown restaurants hand out $2 samples and the recipe card. Sundays, Yoga in the Park at Battery Park. All free, all running to the end of August, and full schedules are here.

Kingston has the highest density of museums in the country (who knew?!), and Historic Places Days is the National Trust for Canada's annual nudge to actually walk into one. This year's theme is Communication Through Place and Time, and it wraps up on Saturday, July 25, which leaves five days. Fort Henry, Bellevue House, Murney Tower, the Canadian Museum of Health Care and the Frontenac County Schools Museum are all taking part, and the Trust has bundled them into a Kingston Museums list you can plan a day around. Take a selfie while you are there. That is the whole assignment.

We covered the Sydenham St. Commons when it opened and then never told you what actually happens there, which turns out to be a lot. With the street closed to traffic between Princess and Queen, the block has patio tables, a play zone, public art and a weekday lineup: Café Franglish on Mondays for Francophones and Anglophones to natter, Chair Fitness and a beginner ASL workshop with Deaf host Bianca on Tuesdays, Silent Reading on Wednesdays under the kites, Bring Your Own Craft on Thursdays, and Spanish conversation on Fridays. Saturdays bring kids' programming, live music and a rotating mini market. All free, all to August 28.

🎵 FEATURED EVENT: One Ground One Sound: A Benefit for Venezuela  |  The Spire, 82 Sydenham St  |  July 27

🏊 Loyalist Township Barr Homes Aquatic Centre Opening  |  W.J. Henderson Community Centre, Amherstview  |  July 20

🤿 Meet a Scuba Diver, TD Summer Reading Club  |  Gananoque Public Library, 100 Park St  |  July 22

🎡 Delta Fair 2026  |  Delta Fairgrounds, Delta  |  July 23–26

🏰 Kids Take Over the Museum  |  Murney Tower Museum  |  July 23

🩰 OFF SEASON Dance Festival  |  Hotel Wolfe Island  |  July 24–25

🎨 Kingston Craft & Collectable Show  |  The Kingston Shrine Club, 3260 Princess St  |  July 25

🏝️ Howe Island Rockin’ the Rock  |  Howe Island  |  July 25

🏛️ Historic Places Days 2026  |  Kingston area historic sites  |  to July 25

🌶️ Hobo Steve’s Hot Sauce Charity for Almost Home  |  Mike’s Pizza and More, 4423 William St, Sydenham  |  July 26

The calendar outgrew the email (Gmail was chopping it off anyway), so it now lives on its own page. You’ll find what’s coming up between now and October, the free stuff that runs all season long like salsa lessons, silent reading under the kites, chef demos and yoga in the park, and every farmers’ and makers’ market in the area with the days they run.

👉 See the full Kingston events calendar

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