After three years away from its original home, the Edmonton Heritage Festival will ring in it’s 50th year back at Hawrelak Park.
The three-day multicultural celebration brings an array of delights from around the world including food, entertainment, crafts and many other activities. With vendors from 65 countries, festivalgoers will find events and stalls spread out across the park.
In accordance with its move back to the park, the festival is premiering new branding with a logo made up of 11 interconnected H’s. Brandish, the creative agency behind the rebrand, said that the logo represents the 11 founding cultural communities that were present for the first year of the festival.
This year will also mark the return of Edmonton’s Food Bank to the cultural exhibition. Long term partners of the event, the food bank is changing up how it will be receiving donations. This year, instead of food, the organization will be accepting monetary based donations on-site. Tamison Bencz-Knight, the director of communications with the Edmonton Food Bank, talked about how much of a boon the festival is to the organization.
“Back in 1983, or 84, we had an information both down here. People spontaneously started bringing donations to us, so we kind of just inserted ourselves here. We’ve been friends ever since,” said Bencz-Knight. The Heritage Festival Association supports the Food Bank’s efforts, and the organization uses it as one of its major fundraisers for the summer.”
As for their change to monetary donations, Bencz-Knight says that the money is used to make specific food purchases to add to their food hampers.
“We buy over $14,000 worth of eggs weekly. As an organization, we buy close to $500,000 worth of margarine yearly, and we buy oil and flour for our cultural hampers. We do need those funds to make sure that we can do all those purchases.”
Heritage Festival will run from August 1 to 3 and vendors will be operating throughout the park all three days.
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