Local historian, The Working Centre honoured
- An award recognized a local historian and The Working Centre for preserving and sharing regional heritage. - Peggy Plet and The Working Centre received an Ontario Heritage Trust award. - The recognition highlights local efforts to document Black history and preserve community memory, organizers say (cbc.ca).
Local historian Peggy Plet and Kitchener nonprofit The Working Centre were among 17 recipients of the 2025 Lieutenant Governor’s Ontario Heritage Awards. (cbc.ca) The awards were presented at a private ceremony at Queen’s Park on April 17, 2026, by Lieutenant Governor Edith Dumont and Ontario Heritage Trust board chair John Ecker. The trust said this was the 20th annual presentation of the awards. (heritagetrust.on.ca) Peggy Plet received the Thomas Symons Award for Commitment to Conservation, an individual honour the trust said recognized work recovering stories “too often been excluded” from Ontario’s history. (heritagetrust.on.ca) The Working Centre was recognized for Queen Street Commons, a Kitchener project that turned a century-old warehouse into supportive housing while preserving a downtown heritage building, according to local reporting. (therecord.com) Plet’s research has focused on Black history in Waterloo Region for 18 years. The Ontario Heritage Trust said she used archives and databases to trace the lives of some of the first Black settlers in Ontario. (heritagetrust.on.ca) One of her best-known projects was “Seeking Home: The Story of Black Settler Levi Carroll,” an exhibit she curated with the City of Waterloo Museum about a formerly enslaved man who escaped to Canada and settled in Waterloo. (heritagetrust.on.ca) The Working Centre’s award landed as the organization continued to run employment, housing and food programs across Kitchener. On its website, the nonprofit said it recorded 54,600 shelter nights, 156,000 meals shared and 100 people housed in its latest annual impact figures. (theworkingcentre.org) The trust said the 2025 awards covered six individual recipients, one youth group and 10 project teams across Ontario. The jury-based program, established in 2006, recognizes work ranging from restoration projects and exhibitions to digital resources and bodies of research. (cbc.ca; heritagetrust.on.ca) For Plet, the award formalized nearly two decades of documenting local Black lives that had been left out of standard histories. For The Working Centre, it put a heritage label on a building reuse project already tied to housing and community support in downtown Kitchener. (heritagetrust.on.ca; therecord.com)
