🌟 Everyone Belongs at Community Living 🏠 $15,000 for Repairs 🚤 Sea-Doo Rescue 🍺 Beer Ships East 🗓️ Events 🔦 July 30, 2026

Local Spotlight

🌟 A Kingston Where Everyone Belongs: Community Living Kingston and District

Kingston & Area Local News

🔨 Up to $15,000 for Urgent Home Repairs Is Open Again in Kingston and Frontenac
💼 Kingston Businesses Get $302,000 to Ride Out the Tariffs
🍺 MacKinnon Brothers Can Finally Ship Beer Across the Country

Community Champions

🪖 Wolfe Island Finishes a Veterans Memorial First Promised in 1946
🚤 A Sea-Doo, Two Boaters, and a Rescue Near Gananoque
⚓ The Great Lakes Museum Lands $15,000 for Its Programs

New Events In and Around Kingston

🎻 FEATURED EVENT: Cataraqui Chamber Music Festival | The Spire | August 5 to 19
🚀 Kingston Startup Ecosystem Rooftop Networking Social | Royal Block Rooftop | July 31
🦋 International Monarch Monitoring Blitz | anywhere in Kingston | July 31 to August 9
✊🏾 Emancipation Day Flag-Raising and Community Art Exhibition | Confederation Park | August 1
🎭 Le Malade Imaginaire (The Imaginary Invalid) | Town Park, Gananoque | August 2
🎨 Creative Connections Lab: Free Accessible Arts Workshops for Adults | Tett Centre | August 6

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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I ordered the very box pictured here from from our sponsor Sarita Machado at Stagecoach Charcuterie to introduce Dianne to the experience, and sat in while she built it. Salami roses, a little honey jar with its own spoon, local extras like dried citrus from Yellow Lion Apothecary or hand-clipped florals from Scarlet & Rosie worked in alongside the cheeses and fruit, everything packed so tight nothing shifts. It’s a lot of box: the two of us happily made it last two sittings.

ICYMI: See how Sarita builds each box by hand, local ingredients and all. Read the full spotlight on Best Eats Ontario East

We save this space for local businesses worth knowing. Drop us a line.

Look at the two of them on this issue’s cover: arms up, mid-celebration, no caption required. That is Community Living Kingston and District, which began in 1953 when a handful of Kingston parents were told the place for their children was an institution, and started a classroom instead. About 600 people of every age in and around Kingston now count on it. Our newest spotlight gets into how it actually works: the executive director who has been there more than 35 years, the thing about Ontario’s adult developmental services that catches families off guard at the worst possible moment, and one short sentence from a local family that stayed with us. Read the full story.

Know a neighbour worth a spotlight? Tell us about them. (Yourself counts, by the way.)

If the roof or the furnace has been quietly climbing your worry list, the City of Kingston has reopened the Kingston-Frontenac Renovates Program for 2026. Homeowners can apply for up to $15,000 as a forgivable loan toward urgent repairs, or up to $5,000 as an accessibility grant that never has to be repaid, capped at $15,000 combined. Stay in the home ten years and the loan is forgiven outright. Sell, transfer or rent before then and repayment runs at 10 percent a year. There is no deadline, which is genuinely generous, but read the next line before you relax: applications are reviewed in the order they arrive, and only while this year’s funding lasts. It covers all of Frontenac County as well as the city, so readers in Sydenham, Harrowsmith, Verona, Inverary and Glenburnie in the Township of South Frontenac are eligible too.

Read the full story at: City of Kingston

Tariffs have been a slow-motion headache for plenty of local companies, and outright devastating for some, so practical help arriving is worth a paragraph. The province is putting $302,000 into Kingston Economic Development through the Trade-Impacted Communities Program, and KEDCO is topping that up to a $492,000, two-year trade resilience project for Eastern Ontario businesses. The aim is steadier supply chains, new customers and more exports, delivered as one-on-one tariff and export advice, targeted training, business matchmaking, an eight-week trade accelerator, trade missions, and soft-landing services for companies testing new markets in Canada and Europe. More than 80 applications have come in from communities across Ontario since the $40 million program launched. If your business is feeling the squeeze, start at KEDCO’s tariff support page.

Read the full story at: Kingston Economic Development Corporation

Here is what a trade agreement looks like from a farm outside Bath. Ontario has signed a new interprovincial deal with eight other provinces, and one practical result is that MacKinnon Brothers Brewing can now ship beer directly to customers in other provinces. The brewery told Kingston Daily it expects only a modest bump in sales, but that it will finally be able to reach former Kingston-area residents living elsewhere in Canada, which is the part we especially like. This is an eighth-generation family operation on a bicentennial farm at 1915 County Road 22, with the family on that land since 1784 and the hops, wheat and barley grown on site. That is a long run of history to arrive at being allowed to ship someone a case.

Read the full story at: Kingston Daily

Some promises take a while. A memorial to Wolfe Island’s Second World War veterans was first proposed in 1946, and it is finally standing: a granite cenotaph in front of Town Hall, the result of a years-long volunteer push led by Kimberley Thomas, former president of the Wolfe Island Historical Society. Support turned up in the unlikeliest places along the way, including a stranger who overheard a conversation about the project in a restaurant and wrote a cheque on the spot. The formal dedication comes on November 11, just ahead of the island’s Remembrance Day service. Eighty years late, and worth every one of them.

Read the full story at: Kingston Whig-Standard

When someone is in trouble on the water, the people already out there are the ones who matter most. Gananoque Fire Service has publicly thanked several community members for their part in a water rescue near town: a young man and his mother who launched a Sea-Doo and went, plus two boaters who brought a woman in distress aboard and stayed with her until emergency crews arrived. No training, no uniforms, no plan for the afternoon beyond being out on the river. They simply went, and that instinct is worth naming out loud.

Read the full story at: Kingston Daily

A $15,000 donation from the Anna and Edward C. Churchill Foundation is heading to the Great Lakes Museum, earmarked for educational and community programming through the 2026-2027 year. That is roughly 300 students moving through STEAM sessions and Great Lakes history programs, plus senior-focused offerings including the Nautical Nights Lecture Series. The museum is a non-profit and registered charity at 55 Ontario Street, best known lately as the home of the SS Keewatin, so this is the kind of gift that turns straight into school visits and lectures rather than disappearing into overhead.

Read the full story at: Kingston Daily

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Two weeks of chamber music arrive at The Spire on Wednesday, August 5, and Harmonaire Musique has built the Cataraqui Chamber Music Festival to be rather more than a concert series. About six concerts run through to August 19, bringing emerging and established Canadian and international players to 82 Sydenham Street, with opening night going to McKenzie Warriner and Ying Zhang. Alongside the music, an Indigenous Cultural Corridor takes over part of the building as a free exhibition space for the length of the festival, and there is a free Indigenous workshop with Robert Spade on August 11. The name rewards a second look too: Cataraqui, often spelled Katarokwi, is an Indigenous term thought to be Mohawk in origin, with meanings including a great meeting place and where the river meets the lake, which is about as good a description of this town as you are likely to get. Full schedule and tickets at harmonairemusique.ca. Watch for a full Kingston Spotlight feature on the festival and the people behind it in an upcoming issue.

If you are building something in Kingston, or thinking about it, or just quietly curious who else is, this is your Friday. Kingston Economic Development hosts a free summer social on the Royal Block Rooftop at 366 King Street East on Friday, July 31, with founders, entrepreneurs, investors, students and the people who back them all in one place. No pitch, no panel, no slide deck anywhere in sight, just introductions and conversation with the city spread out below. It is free and open to anyone in that orbit, and this is the last issue we can tell you about it in. Grab a free ticket on Eventbrite.

For ten days starting Friday, July 31, anyone in Kingston can help scientists work out where monarch butterflies and milkweed are actually turning up, as part of a continent-wide count now in its tenth year. Monarchs lay their eggs on milkweed and nothing else, so finding the plant counts every bit as much as spotting the butterfly. And there is a Kingston-sized hole to fill: the Blitz map flags the grid cell around Executive Lane in the Inner Harbour as a cold spot, 20 milkweed plants and just 2 monarchs back in 2023, with nobody surveying it in any Blitz since. Cataraqui River East, by comparison, logged 95 milkweed and 27 monarchs last year. Set up a free account with iNaturalist Canada or Mission Monarch, step outside, and log what you find.

Kingston marks Emancipation Day on Saturday, August 1 at Confederation Park, across from City Hall, and the City of Kingston has built a full afternoon around the flag-raising. The ceremony brings song performances, a youth tribute, and a keynote from Keishia Facey, Equity, Inclusion and Organizational Change Consultant, on the theme Honouring the Past, Empowering the Future. Alongside it, a community art exhibition puts interactive displays about resistance, freedom and healing in front of you, from artists Alyssa Vernon, King-David Olajuwon, Fred Martins and Joseph Boakye. Food vendors serve Nigerian, Haitian and other cuisines, and a Kingston Frontenac Public Library Kids Zone has Freedom Flag colouring, bracelet-making and a story corner stocked with books by Black Canadian authors. It is free, and everyone is welcome. Full details from the City of Kingston.

A free, professional, French-language Molière production, outdoors, is not something that turns up around here often. On Sunday, August 2, Fâcheux Théâtre brings Le malade imaginaire to Town Park in Gananoque as part of the FestivÎLES of Gananoque, co-presented with Centre culturel Frontenac to open its 2026-2027 season, Des racines à l’avenir. Argan is convinced he is desperately ill and spends accordingly on ever more absurd treatments, and he has decided to marry his daughter Angélique off to a young medical man so he will finally have a useful son-in-law. Angélique loves Cléante, and with the sharp-tongued Toinette in her corner she is not going quietly. Adapted by Sylvain Sabatié, directed by Joël Beddows, with Louis-Antoine Chrétien, Dalia Jaja, André Perrier, Andrée Rainville and Sabatié. Details from Centre culturel Frontenac.

Creative Connections Lab is a free programme of artist-led workshops for adults 18 and over at the Tett Centre for Creativity & Learning, 370 King Street West, built for people who face barriers to taking part in the arts. Sessions move across visual art, movement, music and storytelling, exploring self-expression and chipping away at social isolation, with second-language translation and ASL interpretation available. It runs on a Seed grant from the Ontario Trillium Foundation. The next session, on Thursday, August 6, is Finding Scenes in Everyday Life: Looking, Walking, Writing, which is about as good a description of a Kingston summer afternoon as we have come across. Details and registration at the Tett Centre.

🎻 FEATURED: Cataraqui Chamber Music Festival 2026 | The Spire | August 5 to 19

🏥 Health Adventures Camp  |  Canadian Museum of Health Care, 32 George St  |  July 27 to 31, and August 10 to 14

🚀 Kingston Startup Ecosystem Rooftop Networking Social  |  Royal Block Rooftop, 366 King St E  |  July 31

🎆 South Frontenac’s Delayed Canada Day Fireworks  |  The Point Park, Sydenham  |  July 31

✊🏾 Emancipation Day Flag-Raising and Community Art Exhibition  |  Confederation Park  |  August 1

🦸 Rad Kids Comic and Art Con  |  Nexus  |  August 1

🎭 Le Malade Imaginaire (The Imaginary Invalid)  |  Town Park, Gananoque  |  August 2

🎤 Bad Influence Comedy Tour  |  The Caesar Company, 177 Princess St  |  August 3

🎨 Creative Connections Lab: Free Accessible Arts Workshops for Adults  |  Tett Centre, 370 King St W  |  August 6

🦋 International Monarch Monitoring Blitz  |  Anywhere in Kingston  |  July 31 to August 9

🎒 United Way KFL&A Backpack Program  |  United Way office, 417 Bagot St & Cataraqui Centre  |  July 27 to August 14

🎪 TK Fringe 2026: 17 Unjuried Shows  |  Tett Centre, 370 King St W  |  August 6 to 16

🎻 Cataraqui Chamber Music Festival 2026  |  The Spire  |  August 5 to 19

🏛️ Free Fridays at the Museum of Lennox & Addington  |  Museum of L&A, 97 Thomas St E, Napanee  |  Fridays to August 28

🐱 Groovy Cats Art Colouring Book Fundraiser for Napanee Kitten Rescue  |  Napanee  |  to September 8

Festivals, free weekly programs, museum seasons and every farmers’ market we know about, all in one place and updated with every issue. See the full Kingston Events Calendar, and bookmark it while you are there.

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