I was blown away when I heard nearly 10,000 people turned out last weekend for the grand opening of Whitby's new Fieldgate Sports Complex. That's more people than some of our towns have residents, all there for a rec centre.
A sinkhole opened up under a pool in south Oshawa back in 2024. It stayed shut for two years, past every deadline the city gave it, past eight million dollars in repairs. It reopened yesterday. 🏊♀️
That pool is in this issue. So is a junior hockey club 🥅 in Uxbridge starting its 50th season, and a Scugog golf tournament ⛳ that just cut cheques to four youth groups.
We've also got updates on two past Changemakers this week: a marathon runner and a team of vets who drove north into wildfire smoke, both back home and both showing their work.
Grab a coffee. This is Durham Life!
Photo: Town of Ajax
🏠 Ajax
Habitat for Humanity GTA picked a big one for its next build: 66 affordable homeownership townhomes🏡 at 521 Rossland Road West, in partnership with the Town of Ajax. Council already put $9 million behind it back in June. It's one of the largest projects Habitat GTA has ever taken on in Ontario.
For more info watch the video ⬇️
Source: Town of Ajax / Newswire • Durham Post • Habitat GTA
🌧️ Brock
Book a free Weather-Ready Home Assessment, an expert walkthrough of how your house handles flooding, heat, cold and wind, and Brock residents get a free rain barrel to take home. Supplies are limited.
🕊️ Clarington
On Monday, the Rotary Club of Bowmanville is giving Clarington a permanent gift: a two-metre Peace Pole, dedicated in the new park on the old zoo lands at 2pm, on International Day of Peace. Its message, "May Peace Prevail On Earth," is written in eight languages, including Ojibway and American Sign Language.
For more info watch the video ⬇️
Source: INsauga • Rotary Club of Bowmanville • Global Peace Poles
Photo: City of Oshawa
🏊 Oshawa
The South Oshawa Community Centre pool is finally open again. It's been closed since a sinkhole turned up under the building in the fall of 2024, and the fix ran past $8 million before it was done. Ward 5 Councillor Brian Nicholson had been counting down the days on Facebook. Free swims run this Saturday, and every Oshawa resident swims free for the rest of the year.
Source: INsauga • City of Oshawa
🎳 Pickering
Splitsville Bowl is coming to Pickering City Centre: 29 lanes including a VIP setup, an arcade, VR games, and party rooms. Opening Fall 2026.
Source: Splitsville Bowl Pickering
⛳ Scugog
The 25th Annual Fore Scugog Charity Golf Tournament just handed out its grants, and four local groups are better off for it: Big Brothers Big Sisters of North Durham, the Port Perry 41 Cadet Corps, Blackstock Minor Hockey, and Scugog Arts. The tournament has now raised more than $250,000 for Scugog kids since 2004.
Source: Township of Scugog • Durham Radio News
🏒 Uxbridge
The Uxbridge Bruins are 50 years old this season, and they're marking it properly: a throwback bear logo pulled from their original jerseys, a home opener, and a golf classic with alumni and sponsors.
Source: The Uxbridge Cosmos • Uxbridge Bruins
🐸 Whitby
Lynde Shores is getting three new wetlands, a new lookout, and a 30-metre boardwalk built specifically so you can watch frogs from it, part of a $3.6 million restoration with CLOCA and Ducks Unlimited. The whole thing opens to the public October 3, free, 9:30 to 12:30.
Updates on two past Changemakers this week.
JP Horgan, the Port Perry guy who ran a marathon a day for 14 days back in July, did what he said he'd do. He finished in Montreal, and this week he walked into Community Care Durham and put a $13,000 cheque in the hands of Derrick Keene, the man who trained him to lead the chronic-pain support group he still runs. He didn't earmark a dollar of it. Community Care Durham decides where it goes. He's already talking about the next one: 15 marathons in 15 European countries in 15 days. Thanks JP!
Source: JP Horgan — durhamregion.com
And William Woodstock's Vets Around the Corner, the second Port Perry outfit in this issue, just published their full report on the six weeks they spent at the Thunder Bay wildfires this summer. 812 field-hospital exams. 649 wildfire-affected animals treated for free. Five trips into four First Nations communities, one of them by float plane. Zero animal deaths in their care. The report wasn't required by anyone. They published it anyway. Have a look at it. Pretty Impressive. Thanks William and Team VAC!
🥫 Durham's month-long food drive is a week in, and it runs through October 5. Feed the Need in Durham puts one in four households in this region as food insecure. All eight towns have their own drop-off bins: Clarington alone has bins at nine different community centres and libraries.
Find your town's exact spots:
ajax.ca/FoodDrive
clarington.net/FeedTheNeed
durham.ca/HungerAction
oshawa.ca/FeedTheNeed
pickering.ca/HungerAction
scugog.ca/HungerAction
townshipofbrock.ca/BrockBeatsHunger
uxbridge.ca/FeedTheNeed
whitby.ca/FeedTheNeed
Can't get to a bin? Give online, or ask about volunteering.
Run a Durham group that needs hands? Hit reply and we'll put the word out.
🪶Fri, Sept 19, 10am-noon — Walking Together, Durham Region HQ (605 Rossland Rd E, Whitby). A public walk 🚶♂️ahead of the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, honouring residential school survivors and their families with stories, drumming, and cultural practice, then a walk to Fallingbrook Park and back. Free, open to everyone. Wear orange if you can.
Source: Region of Durham
🎉 This weekend — Downtown Oshawa turns into the biggest party in Durham. Convergence Music + Art Festival runs Saturday and Sunday, its fourth year and its first as a full two-day event. It started in 2023 with about 15,000 people. Last year it topped 34,000. Headliners this time: I Mother Earth and Maestro Fresh Wes on the main stage, plus Jeremie Albino and Reuben and the Dark with the Bullhorn Singers. There's an immersive art exhibit called Dimension X, a Punk Rock Flea Market, live street wrestling, and, new this year, a Durham Roller Derby Showcase. Free to walk through, with ticketed shows layered on top at venues across downtown. Look for a crane sculpture in the art zone by Ajax's own Geordie Lishman, a tribute to his late father Bill Lishman, the real-life "goose whisperer" behind Fly Away Home.
Source: Convergence Oshawa • INsauga
🎪 Fri-Sat, Sept 19-20 — 171st Beaverton Fall Fair, Beaverton Fairgrounds (176 Main St). One of southern Ontario's oldest agricultural fairs. Parade, pedal tractor pulls, a car show, live music, and Saturday's demolition derby at 8pm.
Source: Beaverton Fall Fair
🎶 Sat, Sept 20 — Brooklin Harvest Festival, Baldwin Street, Whitby, 10am-4pm. Free street festival: a farmers' market, three stages of live music, a kids' zone, and restaurant patios out on the sidewalk. Free shuttle runs from Brooklin High School all day.
For more info watch the video ⬇️
Source: Town of Whitby
🪔 Sat-Sun, Sept 20-21 — Claringtoncha Raja, Garnet B. Rickard Recreation Complex, Bowmanville, 11am both days. A two-day Ganesh Chaturthi celebration from the Cultural Association of Clarington, open to everyone: music, dance, food, a kids' zone. Free.
Source: Claringtoncha Raja 2026
📖 Mon, Sept 22 — Colin James and Rick Campanelli, Uxbridge Music Hall, 7pm. Blues guitarist Colin James and MuchMusic's Rick Campanelli both just published memoirs, and they're sharing a stage in Uxbridge to talk about them, part of the lead-up to the Book Drunkard Festival.
Source: Blue Heron Books • Uxbridge Music Hall
🌯 Chipotle opens its first Ajax location today, the same day this newsletter lands in your inbox. It's at 90 Kingston Road East, in the Durham Centre plaza near Harwood Avenue, and it's the chain's second Durham location after Pickering opened one earlier this year. About 60 jobs come with it. The first 50 people to buy an entree on opening day get a free Chipotle-branded speaker.
Source: INsauga
Photo: John E Walker
At Parkwood Estate in Oshawa, photographer John E. Walker has walked the gardens every day this week, and every day he's found a monarch on the same patch of flowers. It's not luck. This is peak migration season: the "super generation" of monarchs born in late summer skips reproducing entirely and puts all that energy into flying up to 4,000 kilometres to a mountain forest in Mexico they've never seen, then living six to eight months to do it. The Toronto and Region Conservation Authority says this year's population is up 64 percent from last year. If you want to help them along, Friends of Second Marsh in Oshawa runs fall programs on the butterflies and their milkweed habitat, and the easiest thing any of us can do is plant milkweed in our own yard.
A monarch hatching in Durham this month will never see this place again. It flies to a mountain forest in Mexico it's never seen either, and it does it anyway.
On Monday, a two-metre pole goes up in a Bowmanville park. It says "May Peace Prevail On Earth" in eight languages, a promise Rotary clubs have been planting in parks around the world since long before anyone reading this was born. The Uxbridge Bruins skated into their 50th season this month. Nobody on this year's roster was even born for the first one.
None of it is really for the person doing it. The butterfly won't come back. The Rotarians planting that pole won't be there for every year it stands. The players who suit up for the Bruins' 75th haven't been born yet either. You plant it, you fly it, you skate it, and you trust someone else picks it up next.
That's the part of Durham worth keeping: we build things for people we'll never meet.
Until next week…
This is Durham Life!
Be Good. Do Good. ❤️
MiKe Dee
Publisher
Durham Life - Local Media that Inspires
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Covering Durham Region's 8 municipalities:
Ajax · Brock · Clarington · Oshawa · Pickering · Scugog · Uxbridge · Whitby