Angela Vieth – Your KW Host
One morning, Angela Vieth got a phone call from her husband while he was at work.
When she answered, he had a question for her. It was a little out of the ordinary.
Would she be able to take a woman and her eight-year-old son out for lunch, and show them a little bit of Kitchener-Waterloo?
“I said sure!” says Angela. “So, I went over there, picked them up, drove them around, and we had a really great time.”
If Angela’s name sounds familiar, there’s a good reason for it. She’s a city councillor in Waterloo (12 years running in Ward 3, to be exact). She’s a co-founding member of Waterloo’s Winterloo Festival. She’s a serial volunteer helping out with Communities in Bloom, Nutrition for Learning, and the Kiwanis Club among many others.
And she’s the founder and Managing Director of Your KW Host, providing personalized tours to visitors in hopes that they enjoy their time so much that they see themselves living in our community one day.
“For me, it’s about hospitality. I love this community. I’ve raised my kids here, we have a great life here,” she says. “We have so much art and culture. The universities, the educational system and facilities are awesome, and many people don’t know about it.”
It’s been 39 years since she moved to the city from Chatham to earn her BA in French and Music from Laurier. It’s also home to her husband and where they raised four children.
While they were building that family, Angela’s husband worked while she stayed at home. And that’s when she started helping the community as a volunteer.
Communities in Bloom was a particular inspiration, she says. She’s worked both sides of the table.
As a judge, she had the opportunity to travel across Ontario to see what communities had to offer. “When I went to these communities, there’s eight criteria that these cities or municipalities have to show off,” she says, like heritage, tidiness and urban forestry.
And as a host, she helped put together the Waterloo tours for visiting judges. “For two or three years in a row, I was helping put together what are we going to show off, figuring out all the logistics and which volunteers and community members were going to be there. It’s tight, you’ve got a short period of time and you want to show off the best of what you’ve got.”
While being a judge was fun – “you get treated like royalty,” she says – something about putting together the tours stuck with her.
Since then, she’s set up tours with everyone from job candidates (to give them a sense of what Waterloo Region life is really like) to conference participants (to have a little fun outside the venue).
But she goes a step further by really getting to know her clients better, so she can hit the highlights and provide the warmest welcome possible.
“If you’re interested in sports, I’ll show you Waterloo Park, the Activa Centre, the Rec Centre. If you want to see some of the neighbourhoods, you want to see a house, you want me to show you some schools, faith places… it’s whatever people really are interested in seeing,” she says.
That’s important when we’re bringing in talent from all over the world, from California to Amsterdam and beyond. “This is the opportunity to show people what we have to offer in this community,” she says. “I just want people, to realize that we have a lot outside of work in this community to offer new recruits.”
Her own favourite places? There are too many to list, she says, but she’s a fan of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, both the St. Jacobs and Kitchener markets, the St. Jacob’s Playhouse Theatre, The Museum, Centre in the Square, the Perimeter Institute, the Clay & Glass Museum and the Jazz Room to name just a few.
And being a city councillor has a few benefits too, she adds.
“The funny thing is, I run into people when I’m out doing this. I can introduce them, so that’s always fun!”
In one case, that meant a personal welcome from Kitchener Mayor Berry Vrbanovic for a tour group. “All of a sudden it didn’t matter that they were late getting back to Langdon Hall. You can’t do that in Toronto. You can’t call up the mayor of Toronto and say ‘hey, can you come out?’”
In the end, it’s all about feeling like you belong in the community, she says.
“If they’re here for a tournament, if they’re here for a vacation or just to visit, I want them, when they leave, to say, ‘I want to go back there. I had a great time, that’s a great community and I’d go back again. You know what, I might even move there if the opportunity arose.’”
Learn more at:
www.yourkwhost.ca