The Kingston Neighbourhood Sharing Centre, operating today at 670 Front Road in Kingston, Ontario and known online through its Kingston ShareHub website, traces its founding back to 1965, when a committee of concerned local women organized in response to poverty they saw firsthand in the surrounding community. According to the centre’s own account of its history, the effort began after the minister of a local church spent time visiting families in the area and encountered many who had very little. That observation led the founding committee to adopt a simple guiding principle that the organization still repeats today: share what you don’t need with those who do. Three churches, St Andrews By the Lake United Church, St Thomas Anglican Church, and Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church, backed the effort from the start, and the group began collecting and redistributing donated goods from the Women’s Institute Hall before moving into vacant storefronts made available by a local supporter, Earl McEwan.
The centre operated out of those borrowed spaces for years before securing a permanent home, with construction of its current building completed in the fall of 1976, near the Kingston landmark known as Centre 70. Six decades after its founding, the organization still runs on the same basic model that started it: community members donate gently used clothing, housewares, and general household items, and the centre resells them at prices well below retail, describing itself as the favourite Kingston community thrift store where all proceeds benefit the community. That framing matters, since every dollar taken in over the counter is directed back toward the centre’s charitable purpose rather than toward private owners or a corporate head office, a structure shared with many long-running Kingston charitable institutions but distinguished here by an unusually well-documented, six-decade continuous history.
The centre keeps a defined, modest schedule that reflects its volunteer-supported, community-funded roots rather than a typical retail operation’s hours. During the regular season, the shop is open Monday through Friday from 10 in the morning until 3:30 in the afternoon, closed on weekends. Through July and August, hours shorten slightly to 10 until 2 on weekdays, still closed Saturday and Sunday, and the centre closes entirely over the winter holiday period, from December 21 through January 4 each year. Shoppers and donors alike can reach the centre directly by phone or email to ask about current hours, donation drop-off, or what the shop is accepting that week.
For anyone in Kingston looking for an affordable source of secondhand clothing and household goods with a genuinely local, non-corporate history behind it, the Kingston Neighbourhood Sharing Centre offers exactly that: a community thrift shop founded in 1965 by a group of local churchwomen responding directly to poverty they saw in their own neighbourhood, still operating on Front Road on the same share-what-you-dont-need principle six decades later, with every sale proceeds directed straight back into the community it was built to serve.
