Cornerstone Citizenship Recipient, 2026
Prepared by: Ashley Foley, Foley Communications & Consulting
On any given morning, the lobby of the Holiday Inn Express & Suites Belleville hums with a particular kind of warmth that is hard to manufacture and impossible to fake.
A staff member from the Enrichment Centre for Mental Health moves through their shift with quiet confidence, as someone who arrived uncertain of their footing and found solid ground. A bowl of fresh fruit sits on the counter before being delivered to young children at Prince of Wales Public School around the corner. Boxes of spaghetti and tomato sauce collect in Lorrie’s office, bound for the pantry at Centennial High School, where teenagers paying rent can’t always afford dinner.
None of this is on the Holiday Inn Express brand checklist. Every bit of it belongs to Lorrie Ostroskie.
This year, the Belleville Chamber of Commerce proudly honours Lorrie Ostroskie, the General Manager of Holiday Inn Express & Suites Belleville, with the 2026 Citizenship Cornerstone Award. It is a recognition of what happens when a person carries their entire life story into their work: the struggles, the losses, the hard lessons, and the deep, unshakeable belief that if you’ve been helped, you help others.
When new ownership acquired the property from Brad Williams, they studied the culture here and asked Lorrie to bring her best practices to their other six hotels. Lorrie describes that as a “we” achievement. The word “I” appears rarely in her vocabulary. That mentality has earned them IHG’s Spirit of Hospitality Award six years running.
Lorrie’s journey of giving isn’t determined by policy or strategy; it is developed through people. One connection leads to another, creating new opportunities for youth and community organizations over and over again. An introduction at a Chamber event leads to passing on a name, which leads to a school visit, which leads to Lorrie becoming an integral part of a school’s weekly hot lunch program. This is not a one-off. These moments have multiplied tenfold because of her.
Standing by her open-door policy, Lorrie has welcomed a steady stream of hotel staff who have completed their own journeys through Enrichment Centre programs and found their footing at the Holiday Inn Express. Lorrie speaks about mental health struggles and accommodation for disability not as a policy stance but as a personal truth: you don’t look away, you don’t make assumptions, and you don’t accept a culture where people aren’t treated with dignity. Half her current staff came through the Enrichment Centre’s programs. They have grown under her watch in ways that surprise even her.
“I think I’ve raised a bunch of good children here,” she says, laughing as she refers to her staff as her family. She also means it completely.
Lorrie’s efforts led to the Mark and Maurice Rollins Workplace Wellness Award in 2023, for creating an environment the Enrichment Centre trusts as genuinely safe. She was later invited to join the Centre’s board, which she considers a distinction she counts among her proudest achievements.
The list of organizations Lorrie supports is long and still growing. Grace Inn receives monthly donations of soap, shampoo, food, and clothing. The hotel runs annual fundraising trees at Christmas, Valentine’s, and Easter, with proceeds supporting local causes. Hot lunches on Fridays generate additional funds. Annual sponsorships support Quinte Bay Gymnastics. The hotel regularly supports local Tim Hortons Smile Cookies campaigns, and hosts Boy Scouts popcorn drives. Prince of Wales Public School receives weekly deliveries of fresh fruit and cereal. Gleaners Food Bank sees Lorrie and her staff arrive to volunteer and pack hampers. Last year, her Coldest Night of the Year team nearly doubled their fundraising total from the year before.
The hotel’s lobby snack station raises funds for students at Centennial High School who are paying rent and can’t afford groceries. A small local market section allows local makers to sell their products, with a portion of sales flowing back to the Enrichment Centre. When IHG updated its standard microwave model and the hotel replaced the old ones, Lorrie didn’t throw them out. She called every high school in the region and donated them so students could have hot lunches.
Among the most ambitious things Lorrie has done, quietly and without fanfare, is the co-op she designed and ran with Seth Potts of Domino’s Pizza, and Christine Burrell, a Loyalist College professor. Twenty-seven students split their placement time between the hotel and Domino’s. Once a week, they gathered and dove into what Lorrie called “Giving for Good.”
They heard from Brenda Snider of United Way, who taught them that even $500 matters to a charity, and how three organizations could give $500 to create $1,500 that didn’t exist before. So, the Giving for Good program was built on a simple idea: small acts of giving, done consistently, adding up to something big.
Lorrie, Seth, and Christine organized a raffle that raised over $2,000 for the Children’s Foundation. But what moved Lorrie most was what happened on the students’ own time: they started showing up at the food bank on weekends. They were going without being asked.
“That was the reward for us,” she says. She pauses. “You don’t even realize it’s happening, until one day you walk into your office and it’s just full of stuff they’ve brought in themselves.”
Lorrie grew up in Prince Edward County, the daughter of a single mother who was just 17 when Lorrie was born. Home was her grandparents’ house, surrounded by family, but short on ease. She has known counselling, hardship, and the heavy weight of life experiences no child should carry. She lost her brother to suicide when he was 21. She has known situations where safety was not guaranteed. She grew up quietly, resiliently, not knowing that the word for what she was doing was “surviving.”
“My struggles made me who I was,” she says. “I had to beat the statistics. So, I always had to prove, prove, prove.”
She graduated from St. Paul’s in 1993, winning every award available to her, only to receive a rejection letter from Loyalist College’s social service program. She was unaware that extracurricular activities were required alongside strong grades. It was a small bureaucratic detail that stung deeply, rerouted her life, and ultimately pointed her toward a place she never expected to go.
She landed in hospitality almost by accident. After years of managing Tim Hortons restaurants, where she built discipline, team culture, and health and safety systems she still draws on today, she met John Williams, who was then running for mayor of Trenton. He sat down in her restaurant and asked what he could do to help. It was such an unusual thing for a politician to do that she never forgot it. When she later saw a listing for the Holiday Inn Express, owned by John’s son Brad Williams, she showed up for what she thought would be a simple front-desk role. She just wanted, as she puts it, “an easy, breezy job.”
Within two years she was running the breakfast department. Within a few more, she was the General Manager. She had arrived intending to be invisible and instead became, quietly, indispensable.
When COVID-19 arrived and the hotel fell silent, Lorrie faced a choice that would define the next chapter of her leadership. With no occupancy and staff who needed paycheques, she took a call from Loyalist College asking if the hotel could house international students who had nowhere to quarantine. She didn’t know exactly how to do it. She said yes anyway.
For nearly two years, the Holiday Inn Express served as a quarantine facility for international students, many of whom had never had access to running water as North Americans do. Lorrie and her team wore goggles, lab coats, and masks, worked hand in hand with the health unit, and managed student arrivals with care and precision. Through it all, not one of their team members tested positive for COVID from their work. In 2021, Lorrie received a Belleville Chamber of Commerce Community Hero recognition for this effort. In 2023, she signed the City of Belleville’s Workplace Inclusion Charter.
But something else happened during that time that mattered more to Lorrie than any award. She had young staff, teenagers working through the uncertainty of COVID, many of them struggling with things they had no name for, showing up at her office door. They were dealing with assault, abuse, self-harm, and family breakdowns. They were scared. And Lorrie, because of everything she had been through in her own life, knew how to sit with them.
“If my story can help one person,” she says, “that was the reason for my story.”
One young woman, bruised and frightened, confided in Lorrie that she wished she hadn’t survived what gave her the bruises she covered up. It hit Lorrie like a wall. She knew that kind of darkness personally. She had been in relationships like that. And she knew that what this young woman needed wasn’t a policy response; she needed comfort and support from someone who had stood where she was standing, and who had survived and come back from it.
Not long after, Lorrie attended a BellTalk event hosted by the Belleville Chamber of Commerce, where she listened to Sandie Sidsworth speak about the Enrichment Centre for Mental Health. Lorrie walked straight up to her afterward and said, “I need to know what I can do to help.” That conversation launched a partnership and a friendship that has since become one of the defining features of the Holiday Inn Express’s operations in this community.
Ask Lorrie what her greatest award is, and she does not mention a plaque, a prize, or an IHG journal. She talks about people.
Sandie Sidsworth, CEO of the Enrichment Centre for Mental Health, who saw Lorrie clearly and asked her to join the board. Jill Raycroft, CEO of the Belleville Chamber of Commerce, who has been a quiet champion of her story. Brenda Snider, whose clarity about community need changed how Lorrie thinks about giving. Patti McDougal, Sandi Ramsay, Lisa Grills, and Stacey Daub. Women she has met through Chamber events, referrals, and the ordinary alchemy of a community that shows up for itself.
“I find it really rewarding,” she says. “Not that men can’t be inspiring. Seth is turning 30 this week, and he has achieved more than most people ever do. But I really gravitate toward powerful women. I’m on this big, powerful, living kind of thing right now.”
There is something Lorrie carries personally: the certainty that she has been underestimated. Reviews still come in using male pronouns for the hotel’s leadership. She doesn’t hide how much that bothers her. As a woman who grew up with odds stacked against her by circumstance, rejection letters, and the quiet cruelties of hardship, Lorrie has built one of this city’s most community-rooted workplaces and keeps winning awards she was told people like her don’t win.
She received the Connie Carson Community Champion recognition in 2025. She was the only person ever nominated for it by three independent nominators, simultaneously. When someone told her that, she joked that it might mean she could retire.
She hasn’t, of course.
Her snack cart is still running.
The fruit boxes are still going out.
And, her office door is still open.
The Belleville Chamber of Commerce proudly recognizes Lorrie Ostroskie as the 2026 Citizenship Cornerstone Award Recipient.
Lorrie Ostroskie is not a grand gestures person. She is a bring-fruit-to-the-school-on-a-Tuesday, person. A call-the-contact-Brenda-gave-me, person. A say-yes-before-you-know-how, person. A keep-the-door-open, person.
And in a city that needs more of that, she has been one of the best things that has walked through one.
1990s – Graduated from St. Paul’s Secondary School, Belleville, winning multiple citizenship and leadership awards.
Early 2000s – Built management career in the food service industry, including Tim Hortons, developing team culture and operational excellence.
2014 – Joined Holiday Inn Express & Suites Belleville, starting in the breakfast department and quickly moving into operations leadership.
2019–2020 – Promoted to General Manager following the passing of founding owner John Williams; navigated the hotel into the pandemic era.
2020–2021 – Partnered with Loyalist College to house and quarantine international students throughout COVID-19 — keeping staff employed and students safe.
2021 – Received the Belleville Chamber of Commerce Community Hero recognition for COVID-era international student care.
2021–Present – Launched and deepened community partnerships with the Enrichment Centre for Mental Health, Centennial High School, Prince of Wales Public School, Gleaners, Grace Inn, Quinte United Immigrant Services, and more than ten additional organizations.
2022 – Co-created the “Giving for Good” co-op with Seth Potts (Domino’s) and Loyalist College — a 27-student program in community-minded citizenship.
2023 – Signed the City of Belleville’s Workplace Inclusion Charter. Received the Mark and Maurice Rollins Workplace Wellness Award from the Enrichment Centre for Mental Health.
2024–Present – Joined the Board of the Enrichment Centre for Mental Health. Participated in the Coldest Night of the Year team walk, nearly doubling fundraising results in year two.
2025 – Named Connie Carson Community Champion — the only person ever nominated simultaneously by three separate individuals.
2026 – Honoured with the Citizenship Cornerstone Award from the Belleville Chamber of Commerce for selfless dedication to causes that improve the lives of Belleville’s citizens.
Story prepared by Ashley Foley, Foley Communications & Consulting.
