Local Centre Wins Heritage Award

A Kitchener community organization and a local historian are among this year’s provincial heritage award winners. (cbc.ca) Peggy Plet received the Thomas Symons Award for Commitment to Conservation, and The Working Centre was recognized for “Making Home at 97 Victoria St. North, Kitchener,” one of 17 projects and people honoured in the 2025 Lieutenant Governor’s Ontario Heritage Awards. (heritagetrust.on.ca) The Ontario Heritage Trust and the Lieutenant Governor of Ontario presented the awards at Queen’s Park on April 17, 2026, in what the trust called the 20th annual presentation. Six individuals, one youth group and 10 project teams were recognized. (heritagetrust.on.ca) The awards cover more than old buildings. The trust says they also honour digital resources, exhibitions and bodies of work that preserve and share Ontario history for future generations. (heritagetrust.on.ca) Plet’s work centers on stories that were often left out of local history, especially the lives of early Black settlers in Waterloo Region. The Ontario Heritage Trust says she has spent 18 years working through archives and databases to bring those histories into public view. (heritagetrust.on.ca) In one example cited by the trust, Plet worked with the City of Waterloo Museum on “Seeking Home: The Story of Black Settler Levi Carroll,” an exhibit about a formerly enslaved man who escaped to Canada and settled in Waterloo. (heritagetrust.on.ca) The Working Centre’s award went to a building project that tied heritage preservation to housing and social services. The trust says the group, with Perimeter Development and BNKC Architects Inc., turned a derelict 1927 warehouse into 44 transitional housing units, health and outreach space, and St. John’s Kitchen. (heritagetrust.on.ca) That project fits the broader role The Working Centre now plays in Kitchener. On its website, the organization says it supports work and livelihood, housing and shelter, outreach, and community enterprise, and reports annual totals including 54,600 shelter nights and 156,000 meals shared. (theworkingcentre.org) The Ontario Heritage Trust said four of this year’s recipients were recognized for recovering and sharing stories that had been excluded from Ontario’s public memory. In that group, Plet’s archival work and The Working Centre’s reuse of a historic warehouse landed on the same provincial list for different reasons, but with the same result: more of Kitchener-Waterloo’s past is now visible. (heritagetrust.on.ca)