Feed the Soul YEG is releasing a year-round dining guide to Black-owned food businesses rather than holding a February dining week, expanding the ways it supports businesses despite funding challenges.
"It was a very competitive funding landscape this year," Feed the Soul founder Rochelle Ignacio told Taproot. "Doing a dining guide instead of doing our dining week takes less human resources of our volunteer team, but also creates this tangible, sustainable way to continue supporting Black restaurants and food producers."
The Black Futures Dining Guide 2026 features 25 Black-owned food businesses, grouped by segments of the city and online businesses, as well as editorial profiles on a few people who personify Black food culture in Edmonton. Feed the Soul has printed 500 copies to distribute at events and at featured restaurants, and Taproot viewed a digital version, which Ignacio said won't be accessible to the public just yet.
The emphasis on physical media is tied to the in-person connections inherent to Feed the Soul's value proposition.
"We believe that food is a bridge — one that can unite communities and reconnect us to culture and identity that may have been disrupted or lost through displacement," a welcome message in the guide reads. "May this guide find its way into the hands of those ready to fill their bellies and nourish their souls."
The guide will first be available at the new O-Day'min Park on March 3, where Cafe Caribbean will be handing out free Trinidadian doubles. The next occasion is at Lochi Afro Nija on March 10, where customers can get a free Nigerian pastry with any purchase.
"It's a way to support the businesses economically," Ignacio said. "(We are bringing) some Trini street food and Cafe Caribbean into the downtown core over lunchtime, while also having a fun way to promote the dining guide and each of the businesses that are featured in the guide."
Feed the Soul will next distribute the guide on March 15 at Behind the Apron: Creative Sustenance Cooking Workshop with Titilope Sonuga at the Stanley A. Milner branch of the Edmonton Public Library. Attendees will prepare a Nigerian meal while hearing from poet laureate emeritus Sonuga about how cultural traditions, flavours, and rituals in cooking can feed creative expression and community connectedness, Ignacio said. The event is aimed at Black creatives.
These in-person events maintain the spirit of Feed the Soul, which also pivoted from its usual dining week in February 2025, organizing a Trinidadian-Chinese pop-up at Fu's Repair Shop instead. The 2025 shift was an opportunity to reset to focus on Black futures, Ignacio said at the time. "Having a futurist mindset and celebrating Black futures allows us to look at Black History Month in just a little bit more of a positive way," she said. "What's the ancestral and the cultural knowledge that we're leaving behind for a future generation?"
Diners gathered at Yardie Sweet Spot & Pastry during Feed the Soul YEG's Ten Dolla Deals event in October 2025. Yardie is one of the businesses featured in Feed the Soul's Black Futures Dining Guide 2026. (Dong Kim)
Fu's was later a partner restaurant at Feed the Soul's 10 Dolla Deals dining week in October, which added Indigenous and racialized food purveyors to the Feed the Soul mix.
"With migration patterns and the changing demographics of the city, we're making sure that there's visibility, and that people are able to easily not only see food from their culture, but experience (those of other ethnicities)," Ignacio said.
The lane switch to a dining guide is partly to increase attention on Black history and futures beyond February, but also because of the grant landscape, which many community organizations are struggling with. "It's not a problem unique to Edmonton's Black community," Ignacio said. "It's just where we are at with philanthropy."
The guide was funded by $6,000 provided by the City of Edmonton, ATB, the Edmonton Community Foundation, the Africa Centre, and the Edmonton Heritage Council. Much of the total came from the Black History Month Initiative Fund, which awarded grants to 23 of 96 applicants in 2026.
It would cost more than $6,000 to do a dining week to Feed the Soul's standards, Ignacio said, but what began as a funding challenge turned into a creative opportunity.
"The dining guide was not a dream of ours — I don't even think it was a dream in December 2025 — but it's something that we're really proud of," she said. "Because something's changing, you have to look at what the benefit is and how it can push you into new areas that you didn't necessarily think were possible before."
Looking ahead, Feed the Soul is recruiting volunteer team members as Ignacio makes room for new stewardship for the organization.
"(The guide project is) really signalling this community-led version of Feed the Soul, where I'm stepping more into an advisory role," she said. "We have a new leadership team that are starting to make more of those decisions and bringing in their own ideas and creativity to what we do."