Our Story
After graduating from teachers’ college in 2015, Pipe Major John McKay had a vision of a pipe band for youth in Kingston. Through mutual friends he connected with Lead Drummer Scott Nicholson in April 2016 and they quickly realized that they shared the same values of:
Reaching out to parts of the community who don’t traditionally have access
Providing free lessons
Forming a community performance and competitive pipe band
Forming community partnerships such as the ones forged with the Kingston Police Services and the Boys and Girls Club of Kingston
Bringing in skilled instructors for different instruments
The Band Begins
The band began meeting the fall of 2015 at the Faculty of Education, Duncan McArthur Hall at Queen’s University. Here, we began offering our free programming and got by through the borrowing of equipment and operated under the banner name “Kingston Pipe Band”. In February of 2016 we officially incorporated as a not for profit and began looking for opportunities to make money to support our programming.
We continued to grow over 2016 performing where ever we could to promote ourselves. In February of 2017, we were able to apply to do bingos through Community Spirit Bingo where we receive monthly funds to support our programming.
In May of 2017, after nearly 18 months of discussions, it was confirmed that our little project was going to grow. We had confirmation that we would be working alongside Kingston Police to build a pipe band that would represent them in the community and across the province
