It’s not common to have a woman-led hospital working in collaboration with a woman-led hospital foundation. Even less common is a partnership that is so perfectly aligned in vision and motivation to serve the community.

That’s what makes the one between the Peterborough Regional Health Centre (PRHC) and the PRHC Foundation so exceptional, and gives patients and donors the confidence to put trust in their guidance.

This International Women’s Day, PRHC and the PRHC Foundation are celebrating their female leadership and the successful partnership between them.

“From the Foundation’s perspective, as much as donors are generously donating financial support, in a sense it’s not only about the money — it’s also about the mission,” says PRHC Foundation President and CEO Lesley Heighway.

“When a donor makes a financial contribution to the PRHC Foundation, at the core of their philanthropy they’re giving to make things better. From that perspective, it is important that the community sees this great partnership that we have with the hospital, knows there’s that strong level of alignment, and knows that we’re doing the planning together in terms of our work and how it supports the work of the hospital.”

Prior to joining PRHC Foundation in 2008 and leading the organization since 2011, Heighway spent much of her career working in healthcare and wellness, including in the pharmaceutical side of the dental industry and at a resort for wellness. It was while raising funds for an initiative that supports dental clinics in Cambodia that Heighway fully realized where she belonged.

“It was at that point that I purposefully sought out something in the not-for-profit sector where I could see the impact of my work and of the organization’s work touching a very broad base of the community,” she says.

For PRHC President and CEO Dr. Lynn Mikula, who has been in her role since 2023, it was not always her intention to lead a hospital. Instead, she trained and worked hard to become a surgeon with a thriving practice but, as she began to do more administrative work, she saw an opportunity to use her leadership skills in a different way.

“There was a moment when I realized that I could actually do a lot of good by making sure that the hospital, the organization, and the system are supporting the people who actually deliver the care in the best way possible,” Dr. Mikula says. “I’ve found great reward by focusing on how to best support the people who are delivering the care and making sure that the hospital is there for patients when they need us.”

Their roles as leaders extend outside the hospital, as Dr. Mikula and Heighway are both mothers. They agree this experience has also taught them much about how to lead, in particular with humility, compassion, empathy, and patience.

“While in your professional work, if you’re the CEO, people are looking to you as the leader to show the way,” Heighway says. “Certainly at home, you’re modelling all of the right behaviours. You’re trying to support your children as best you can, but ultimately, they’re going to chart their own path. Sometimes, that might not be the path that you foresaw. It might be in a completely different direction, but you step behind them and you’re supportive.”

Since the PRHC Foundation launched the $70 million Campaign for PRHC, the largest fundraising campaign in the hospital’s history, more than 86 per cent of the goal has been raised to date.

These funds have already supported life-changing initiatives including, among others, upgrading the cardiac cath lab, opening a new inpatient care space designed to prepare patients for their return home, developing an outdoor healing space for patients in the Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU), and upgrading and expanding the interventional radiology suites.

According to Heighway, the key to the successful partnership between the hospital and its foundation is the “shared ambition” for the vision of the regional hospital.

“It’s very bold,” says Heighway. “Our role is to step alongside the hospital as a Foundation with our donors to support that vision as best as possible and to be aligned. We’re always speaking from the same playbook and understanding each other’s efforts. That benefits our donors because, whether it’s me or our team out in the community, they know that we are representing the vision and the work of the hospital.”

“When our two organizations align around a shared priority, then we do incredible things for patient care,” adds Dr. Mikula, who explains that the PRHC Foundation is an essential part of the relationship the hospital has with each and every patient, loved one, and caregiver who steps through its doors.

“If that relationship was productive and healthy and served the patient in the way that they were hoping, they want to give back to the hospital and that happens through the Foundation,” she says. “To me, I view this as an extension of the caregiver-patient relationship. Healthcare does not just happen in that one moment. It goes much, much further. And that’s why this — the hospital and Foundation — is the most important partnership to me.”

This year the theme of International Women’s Day is “Give to Gain,” which encourages a mindset of generosity and collaboration as a way to forge gender equality. This is why support for mentorship and professional development are important to both Dr. Mikula and Heighway.

Though surgery is not traditionally a female-dominated industry, Dr. Mikula says she felt “fortunate” to have been supported during her training. Only as she became a more senior leader did she learn the extent of barriers that exist for women in the healthcare sector and realize she needed to give back.

“I needed to do what was done for me, which is to make those barriers go away so that other women could thrive and reach their full potential, because then we all do better,” Dr. Mikula says. “It’s better for everyone.”

While the healthcare workforce is largely female across all job roles, leadership positions only make up a small portion of those roles. Dr. Mikula suggests that female professionals in healthcare leadership do not receive pay equivalent to commensurate roles in male-dominated professions.

“We need to keep working for every single role in healthcare,” she says. “How do we develop women to step into leadership roles? How do we make it an opportunity? How do we make it structurally easy? The fact that they may want to have a family should not be a barrier. And then, how do we make sure that we are rewarding the kind of leadership that women bring, which is often different? It’s all about how you recognize and elevate the value that women bring to this wonderful profession.”

Heighway suggests the same barriers exist on the Foundation’s side, given that 80 per cent of the workforce in the not-for-profit sector is female and yet, in leadership roles, they earn nearly 18 per cent less than their male counterparts.

Like Dr. Mikula, Heighway participates in mentee programs and is proud of the way the Foundation invests in professional development.

“As I look around Peterborough, there are so many wonderful people who’ve begun their careers at PRHC Foundation, grown, and maybe taken a step outward,” she says. “Investment and mentorship are so key. I believe we all do better when women can achieve their full potential.”

This International Women’s Day, the message from Dr. Mikula and Heighway for women in leadership positions is to be brave, try not to let feelings of imposter syndrome be an obstacle to taking the next step in your career journey, and continue to lead with confidence even when facing uncertainties.

“One of the things I value most about our partnership is the opportunity to talk through uncertainties, worries, and anxieties and then to support each other in going ahead and making the decision and figuring out how it’s going to work out,” says Dr. Mikula.

“There is still so much joy in leadership and so much that you gain from being a leader. It’s a wonderful job that I feel very privileged to have, but it does take just being a little bit brave and realizing ‘I might not always get it all right, but I’m going to do it anyway.'”

“I think women are maybe a little more predisposed to wanting to have every single ‘i’ dotted and ‘t’ crossed before taking that step,” Heighway adds. “But just take the step. Just have confidence. Don’t be afraid to chart a new path or new direction for yourself.”

This branded editorial was created in partnership with the PRHC Foundation. If your organization or business is interested in a branded editorial, contact us.

Peterborough will be hosting the Great Canadian Cheese Festival, Canada’s largest celebration of cheese, this June.

The 2026 festival will take place at the Morrow Building beside the Peterborough Memorial Centre on Saturday, June 13 and Sunday, June 14, running from 9 a.m. to- 5 p.m. on Saturday and 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Sunday.

After an eight-year hiatus, the reinvented festival returned last May and was hosted at Fort Henry in Kingston.

“The response in our first year was overwhelming,” said Patricia McDermott, owner of Agrarian Market in Prince Edward County and the executive director of the festival, in a media release. “Guests were hungry for discovery, and our makers delivered. We listened, we learned, and we’re thrilled to expand the experience even further in 2026.”

Last year’s festival hosted over 100 Canadian dairy producers and artisans from across the country and featured tutored cheese tastings with beverage pairings, children’s cheese-making activities, professional development seminars, live entertainment, and more.

The 2026 festival will include both returning and new vendors, with general admission including access to all vendors, unlimited sampling, and the chance to explore a curated marketplace of cheesemakers, bakers, chocolatiers, cideries, wineries, and specialty food artisans.

Available at an extra cost, the intimate tutored tastings will see dairy industry experts pair Canadian cheeses with wines, ciders, and other complimentary beverages.

“These sessions sell out every year,” McDermott said. “Once people attend one, they always come back. It’s a truly immersive flavour experience.”

A general admission day pass to the festival is $35, or $50 for the entire weekend. Premium admission, which includes a insulated cooler swag bag and tasting glasses, is $50 for a day or $65 for the weekend. A VIP experience day pass, which includes the swag bag as well as tutored tasting access, is $115. Individual tutored tasting sessions cost $65 each.

“It’s a great fit for our city, adding one more reason to celebrate local food, restaurants, and farmers’ markets,” said Peterborough city councillors and community services co-chairs Lesley Parnell and Alex Bierk in a joint statement.

“It also gives the city an opportunity to highlight Ontario products, small businesses, and celebrate the way that food brings people together.”

For more information about the festival and to order passes and tutored tasting tickets, visit cheesefest.ca.

In the four years since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Peterborough native Chloë Black has embarked on six humanitarian aid trips to the war-torn county.

“I didn’t anticipate how much you fall in love with the country and the people,” Black tells kawarthaNOW over Zoom from Kharkiv. “You realize once you go back (home to Canada), no matter how good or bad things are going over here (in Ukraine), there’s just this constant pull to want to come back and help.”

When Black thinks back to when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, there was a culmination of factors that led to her decision to leave the comfort of home to visit Ukraine the first time — despite having no ancestral connections to the country and no military background or experience in a war zone.

“Although I’ve never had any desire to be in the military, at all, I’ve always had a lot of admiration for those generations whose incredible sacrifices I always feel like we all got to profit off of,” Black says. “They were sort of a societal sacrifice, unlike a lot of wars that came after.”

A former competitive cyclist and Peterborough Sports Hall of Fame inductee, Black was in Tucson, Arizona during the pandemic working alongside someone who came from a small town in Ukraine that had been under occupation for about one month. He hadn’t had any contact with his family, and Black says she kept waiting for the world to respond in the way she imagined they did during World War II — but that didn’t happen.

“I remember having these conflicting moments in my head where everything changed,” she says. “I kept yelling at the world like, ‘Why aren’t we doing anything? Why is nobody doing anything?’ We’re watching, saying it’s terrible, and we’re reporting it, but nobody’s doing anything.”

Then, a switch flipped when Black realized she couldn’t be upset at the rest of the world if she wasn’t prepared to do something herself.

“I had those moments where I think I’ve got a good life and things are comfortable and I’m starting to get ahead in life, and then I would feel guilty because so did the people here (in Ukraine),” she recalls. “They didn’t choose this. They didn’t plan for their house to be destroyed, or their children to get killed, or their city to be occupied.”

Though initially Black thought she’d do humanitarian aid, seeing many people in animal rescues trying to move pets to avoid the bombings struck a chord with her.

“That’s when my heart just completely jumped out of my chest. I hadn’t even really thought about the fact that there’s all these animals that have no idea what’s going on — and that’s just domestic animals. I think it’s hard enough to get help for stray animals when there’s not a war.”

That’s what Black is doing now in Kharkiv, living in the apartment of a friend whose daughter she met in Peterborough. She provides care in an animal shelter but, in a few weeks, she’ll be returning to Kyiv where she will work once again with Ukrainian Patriot, an organization that provides aid to frontline defenders and civilians living with the constant threat of shelling.

“A lot of their focus has been just trying to bring some of the kids a little bit of trauma therapy, and really just helping them to get out of the mindset that they have to be in in order to be in an area that’s so close to the front lines,” Black says.

“There are some kids that since COVID have not actually been into a physical classroom. Some kids can, if they have a bomb shelter, but especially kids in the east — it’s too easy to target a school. So, they either have to have a bomb shelter in the school or they just do online learning.”

Through Ukrainian Patriot, Black will be engaging kids in dance and art activities, English classes, and opportunities to just interact with each other. Prior to her departure from Peterborough, she reached out to the community to collect toques, mittens, colouring books, crayons, pencils, and other gifts she could bring for the children.

“It was pretty amazing actually. I had people literally walking up to me in social settings and just handing me a bag full of stuff,” she says. “They (Ukraine Patriot) have what’s called a tickle trunk with all the kids’ stuff in it, and basically I was able to take all the stuff from that suitcase and just fill the tickle trunk.”

During her first trip to Ukraine, Black says she “couldn’t have imagined it getting darker” but was proven wrong during subsequent trips. However, she says she has since seen progress in Ukraine, including a “more confident and self-assured” military.

As for what Black is seeing on the ground during this trip, she says the Ukrainian people remain resilient, though they’re exhausted and worn out from the power failures that make it hard to plan anything.

“These are things that could happen anywhere, but it happens here all the time and every day,” she points out. “While I’ve seen every level of exasperation in people that are normally very resilient and normally very ‘I can figure this out’ or ‘We’ll do something else’, they just look done.”

As for Russia’s constant bombing with missiles and drones, Black says “It’s a tactic and it’s working in that it’s wearing people down,” but that Ukraine is not going to give in.

“I just don’t think anyone can really understand how they won’t quit, and they won’t stop fighting to get their territory back or their children back, or their prisoners of war back,” she says. “This is just so unnecessary — so much unnecessary death and destruction — because it’s never going to end that way that Putin wants it to. It’s just not. It’s just going to be a long, death-filled process, that’s all.”

Black explains that life near the front lines has become so normalized that most people don’t even seek refuge in bomb shelters when the air-raid alarms sound anymore. Last year, Kharkiv averaged about five alarms per day (an alarm even sounded during Black’s Zoom call with kawarthaNOW).

“If there’s an air alert, you go ‘Well, I hope it’s not here’ because it’s just so much that you can’t possibly just keep running downstairs every single time,” Black says. “It’s been over a year of these really heavy attacks in the big urban centres, and it’s been four years of these alerts going off constantly. You can’t live like that. Running for the shelter is not really what people do, and it’s not because they’re trying to be stoic about it — you just can’t live like this.”

If you want to show support to Ukraine, Black suggests telling your elected officials you approve of their support and, even though it sounds small, don’t stop flying your Ukrainian flags. Another way to offer aid from home is to purchase Ukrainian products.

“The stores are operating as best they can and they’re pretty well stocked,” Black says. “They’ve done a fantastic job. Even with all these power outages, you hear generators every morning so the coffee shops can open. No matter what, they will get their generator going and serve you a hot cup of coffee.”

To anyone thinking about volunteering in Ukraine, Black says “you won’t regret it.”

“It’s really amazing thing to be part of a volunteer community, especially in a place where it needs you so desperately,” she says. “When I first came here, I didn’t know anything about Ukraine. I (still) don’t know how to speak the language — I’m learning very slowly how to say a few things. This shows how naive I was, but I wasn’t expecting it to be so much like home.”

If Black has one message to send back home, it’s to warn Canadians to be careful about making assumptions, noting “The bottom line is we don’t want anyone outside of our country telling us how to run our country” and that Ukrainians feel the same.

“Democracies are complex, and they’re complicated and they’re ugly at times, and they don’t always look pretty,” she says. “When people look at Ukraine they should think about themselves, because all they are wanting is what we would want — which is a right to have self-determination.”

If you’d like to hear more about Black’s work, she will be doing a presentation during a fundraiser for Ukraine on Thursday, June 11 at the Market Hall Performing Arts Centre in downtown Peterborough. Her father Alan Black will be performing, as well as Tony D (Guitarro) from MonkeyJunk. More details and ticket sales will be announced soon.