Edmonton’s Summer Festivals Are Bigger Than You Think

Great fun for the whole family, inclusive ways to experience the diversity and talents in Edmonton, and community-driven social consciousness—what doesn’t Festival City have? We’ve certainly got a lineup to be proud of.

Our city’s summer festival season is legendary. In non-pandemic years, people would flock from around the world for food, entertainment, and family-friendly fun. While the 2020 season saw many cancellations, this year’s organizers have been working cautiously and excitedly to present visitors with safe, accessible programming. The running theme for Edmonton’s summer festival season seems to be this: support local. Local artists, local restaurants, local organizations, local charities—everyone wins with community engagement, even you.

The Edmonton Heritage Festival partners with cultural groups throughout Alberta to share and celebrate various traditions of song, dance, and food—and approximately 100,000 to 150,000 people visit Hawrelak Park each day of the festival to experience it.

“The whole point of this event is to celebrate multiculturalism, which is really a nod in the way towards fighting racism,” says Jim Gibbon, executive director of the Edmonton Heritage Festival Association. “It’s giving people a chance to come together and experience firsthand people whose backgrounds—whose dancing, cultures, foods—are not the same as theirs, and realize how lucky we are to have those people as part of our lives.”

It’s considered the world’s largest festival in multiculturalism and is rare in how it celebrates numerous cultures at once. In fact, it’s one of only two festivals in Canada recognized as an important cultural asset by UNESCO and the International Council of Organizations of Folklore Festivals and Folk Arts (CIOFF).

For Multicultural Month in 2020, Heritage Festival shared a video on their website that was then shared by UNESCO—resulting in the video reaching over 100,000 views from over 80 countries. “We have this incredible reach, and every day more and more countries learn about Edmonton and the Heritage Festival, and how great Edmonton is as a result,” says Gibbon. And that will still include the 2021 season, which kicks off with the inaugural World Music Week.

Priding itself on its inclusivity and accessibility, Heritage Festival has always offered entrance and entertainment free of charge. While this year will bring changes to a well-loved festival that’s run since 1976, including the addition of pre-booked timed-entry tickets to manage capacity and promote safe distancing, those tickets will still be free.

They’ve also partnered with Kids Up Front and the Edmonton Food Bank to create Heritage Youth, a new community initiative to bring children to the event who may not have a chance to attend otherwise and provide those children with food tickets to experience the festival. While the numbers are small this year due to the pandemic, Gibbon hopes to expand the program in the future. “If we could do thousands and thousands every year, that would be huge. Then you’re doing real outreach and helping real people to learn about different cultures,” says Gibbon.

Along with free timed-entry tickets to stagger attendance, the 2021 Heritage Festival will also have fewer pavilions than they’ve hosted in the past to increase distancing in the park. You can find more information about the health and safety protocols on their website, including eating spaces, plexiglass windows, and moat spacing between stages and the audience. The website is also where you can access Multicultural Month, a virtual festival live for all of August to share more performances, local cultural restaurants, and crafts and artworks.

Spreading out the open-air festivals is a common strategy, though it can be more difficult if you’re established in an urban core. This is Taste of Edmonton’s first year back in downtown’s Churchill Square after being displaced for two years due to construction. “It feels like we’re going home,” says Donovan Vienneau, general manager of Events Edmonton, the non-profit group behind the festival. “We want people to come back, but we also want them to feel safe by coming back.”

Volunteer-driven, the team is excited to launch the 2021 festival season after the necessary cancellation in 2020. While losing the festival and being temporarily laid off were difficult, Vienneau was particularly crushed over the losses experienced by the Taste of Edmonton Community Fund.

In 2019, Events Edmonton and Taste of Edmonton gave back over $100,000 to local charities, including Kids Sport, Hope Mission, and the Christmas Bureau. “We are non-profit, and we work with amazing charities that need the support, and they benefit from Taste of Edmonton running,” says Vienneau. “It crushed me a little bit in 2020.” New this year, they’re hosting their first-ever 50/50 raffle to increase their fundraising efforts.

Showcasing 100% local cuisine with local participating restaurants, Taste of Edmonton is considered Western Canada’s largest food and entertainment festival, which also meant several changes to ensure compliance with Alberta Health Services. While the festival grounds will cover the largest area it’s ever had and include more food trucks, the number of represented restaurants will decrease—all to increase social distancing and promote safety. There will also be standalone sanitization stations, more ticket booths, spaced seating areas, and electronic counting systems to manage capacity. And to increase your sampling potential? About 85% of the participating restaurants will include a new third menu item with a max value of two tickets, meaning more options for each sheet.

Check out the many festivals around the city this summer and get ready to have fun with your loved ones. “There’s a lot of great things and great memories when people come to these outdoor events, whether it’s somebody going to Heritage Days and supporting that amazing scene, or it’s going to Fringe or the Street Performers’ or The Works,” says Vienneau. “The list just goes on and on.”