Community Calendar

May 1 - May 31 / Join us for a month-long celebration of new vegan dishes all over Kalamazoo!

Back by popular demand for the fourth year in a row, businesses across Kalamazoo will showcase exciting special vegan menu items for an entire month, giving everyone the opportunity to explore creative plant-based dishes crafted by talented local chefs.

How It Works:

1- Visit participating restaurants across Kalamazoo.
2- Try their exclusive vegan offerings.
3- Share your experience: Rate and review the dishes you try, comment, post photos of your favorite meals, and tag us at @KalamazooVeganChefChallenge.

This event is open to everyone, not just vegans! It’s about bringing our community together to celebrate incredible food and support our area's chefs.

Get Involved: Looking for ways to connect? Volunteer with us! We’re seeking passionate individuals to help with outreach, event promotion, and community building throughout the month. It's a great way to meet like-minded people and make a difference! Volunteer using this link: TinyURL.com/VOLVCC.

Join us in making Kalamazoo an even more inclusive, vibrant, and compassionate community. For details on participating businesses, menus, partners, and more, visit our website at veganchefchallenge.org/Kalamazoo.

The Kalamazoo Vegan Chef Challenge is hosted by Vegan Outreach and in collaboration with Vegan Kalamazoo.

What does it mean to curate as we live through apocalyptic times? Join our 2026 West Michigan Area Show juror, Dr. Xuxa Rodríguez, as she shares about her curatorial practice and explores what making exhibitions and writing about art means as the stakes of our collective global livelihoods grow higher. Dr. Rodríguez will offer reflections and proposals for working and living through difficult times to find meaning and hope even in the darkest of days.
Xuxa Rodríguez, Ph.D., is a curator, scholar, and writer, originally from Miami, FL. Her expertise ranges across modern and contemporary Latinx and Latin American Art, African diasporic art, feminist and queer art, transnational artists, and time-based media, with strengths in performance and video. Now based in Durham, NC, she is the Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Curator of Contemporary Art at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.

Our ArtBreak program will be on hiatus in June and July. Join us in August when ArtBreaks resume!

Virtual events will go live on our YouTube page on the indicated dates and times. They can be found under the “Live” tab. Recordings of select past events are available on YouTube as well. Unless otherwise indicated, no registration is necessary.

May 1 - May 31 / Join us for a month-long celebration of new vegan dishes all over Kalamazoo!

Back by popular demand for the fourth year in a row, businesses across Kalamazoo will showcase exciting special vegan menu items for an entire month, giving everyone the opportunity to explore creative plant-based dishes crafted by talented local chefs.

How It Works:

1- Visit participating restaurants across Kalamazoo.
2- Try their exclusive vegan offerings.
3- Share your experience: Rate and review the dishes you try, comment, post photos of your favorite meals, and tag us at @KalamazooVeganChefChallenge.

This event is open to everyone, not just vegans! It’s about bringing our community together to celebrate incredible food and support our area's chefs.

Get Involved: Looking for ways to connect? Volunteer with us! We’re seeking passionate individuals to help with outreach, event promotion, and community building throughout the month. It's a great way to meet like-minded people and make a difference! Volunteer using this link: TinyURL.com/VOLVCC.

Join us in making Kalamazoo an even more inclusive, vibrant, and compassionate community. For details on participating businesses, menus, partners, and more, visit our website at veganchefchallenge.org/Kalamazoo.

The Kalamazoo Vegan Chef Challenge is hosted by Vegan Outreach and in collaboration with Vegan Kalamazoo.

"Wild Kratts Live 2.0 is a theatrical stage show based on the hit animated television series Wild Kratts. Martin and Chris Kratt, stars of the Emmy-nominated Wild Kratts, step out live on stage to engage the audience in a classic Wild Kratts story! Martin and Chris are sure to keep you entertained as they activate some fan favorite Creature Power Suits and go “Off to the Creature Rescue!” With the help of the Wild Kratts team—and their audience members—the Kratt Brothers confront a comic villain and help bring the creatures of the animal world to safety once again! Experience, live-on-stage, the astounding creature fundamentals, and the infectious excitement and inspiring quest of the Kratt Brothers that make the hit television series Wild Kratts so popular with kids and their families.

Since 2014, Wild Kratts Live 2.0 has performed over 225 shows for hundreds of thousands of fans in over 135 cities across North America. It was created for the stage by the imaginative minds of Martin and Chris Kratt from Zoboomafoo, Kratt’s Creatures, and Be the Creature."

May 1 - May 31 / Join us for a month-long celebration of new vegan dishes all over Kalamazoo!

Back by popular demand for the fourth year in a row, businesses across Kalamazoo will showcase exciting special vegan menu items for an entire month, giving everyone the opportunity to explore creative plant-based dishes crafted by talented local chefs.

How It Works:

1- Visit participating restaurants across Kalamazoo.
2- Try their exclusive vegan offerings.
3- Share your experience: Rate and review the dishes you try, comment, post photos of your favorite meals, and tag us at @KalamazooVeganChefChallenge.

This event is open to everyone, not just vegans! It’s about bringing our community together to celebrate incredible food and support our area's chefs.

Get Involved: Looking for ways to connect? Volunteer with us! We’re seeking passionate individuals to help with outreach, event promotion, and community building throughout the month. It's a great way to meet like-minded people and make a difference! Volunteer using this link: TinyURL.com/VOLVCC.

Join us in making Kalamazoo an even more inclusive, vibrant, and compassionate community. For details on participating businesses, menus, partners, and more, visit our website at veganchefchallenge.org/Kalamazoo.

The Kalamazoo Vegan Chef Challenge is hosted by Vegan Outreach and in collaboration with Vegan Kalamazoo.

The work of West Michigan’s talented artistic community is on view during the annual West Michigan Area Show. This crowd-pleasing annual juried exhibition was carefully curated from more than 300 submitted entries, ranging from paintings, prints, and photos to mosaics, ceramics, jewelry, sculpture, and mixed-media works.

Learn more about the West Michigan Area Show and the application process on the exhibition page.

May 1 - May 31 / Join us for a month-long celebration of new vegan dishes all over Kalamazoo!

Back by popular demand for the fourth year in a row, businesses across Kalamazoo will showcase exciting special vegan menu items for an entire month, giving everyone the opportunity to explore creative plant-based dishes crafted by talented local chefs.

How It Works:

1- Visit participating restaurants across Kalamazoo.
2- Try their exclusive vegan offerings.
3- Share your experience: Rate and review the dishes you try, comment, post photos of your favorite meals, and tag us at @KalamazooVeganChefChallenge.

This event is open to everyone, not just vegans! It’s about bringing our community together to celebrate incredible food and support our area's chefs.

Get Involved: Looking for ways to connect? Volunteer with us! We’re seeking passionate individuals to help with outreach, event promotion, and community building throughout the month. It's a great way to meet like-minded people and make a difference! Volunteer using this link: TinyURL.com/VOLVCC.

Join us in making Kalamazoo an even more inclusive, vibrant, and compassionate community. For details on participating businesses, menus, partners, and more, visit our website at veganchefchallenge.org/Kalamazoo.

The Kalamazoo Vegan Chef Challenge is hosted by Vegan Outreach and in collaboration with Vegan Kalamazoo.

Kalamazoo River Guardians
Are you looking for an opportunity to better understand your local watershed? Become a Kalamazoo River Guardian! Working with a team of experts, participants will help sample parts of the Kalamazoo River watershed and its local tributaries for macroinvertebrates (water bugs). Samples will be brought back to the lab to be identified under microscopes as a group. The data collected contributes to a statewide database used for valuable research and monitoring of water quality. No prior experience is required.

Fee: Free event, $5 optional pizza lunch
Audience: All Ages (children must have an adult in attendance)
Meet: Merrill Park, 5845 Comstock Ave., Kalamazoo, MI 49048

This event is recommended for those older than 8. If you have a younger person who you would like to bring, please connect with us and we can discuss ways in which they can participate safely and while having a fun experience. A chaperone is required to accompany participants younger than 14. Participants must have transportation to the sampling site and Heronwood Field Station (lab and lunch location).

Wetland Wonders
Saturday, May 30, Noon-3 pm
Audience: All Ages
Meet: Cooper’s Glen Auditorium

Swamps, bogs, marshes, fens… we love these marvels of our local ecology, but how well do you know your neighborhood wetlands? Learn about the wetlands here at KNC and take part in some exciting citizen science to sample and identify some of our wetland inhabitants.

Fee: Included in regular KNC admission

May 1 - May 31 / Join us for a month-long celebration of new vegan dishes all over Kalamazoo!

Back by popular demand for the fourth year in a row, businesses across Kalamazoo will showcase exciting special vegan menu items for an entire month, giving everyone the opportunity to explore creative plant-based dishes crafted by talented local chefs.

How It Works:

1- Visit participating restaurants across Kalamazoo.
2- Try their exclusive vegan offerings.
3- Share your experience: Rate and review the dishes you try, comment, post photos of your favorite meals, and tag us at @KalamazooVeganChefChallenge.

This event is open to everyone, not just vegans! It’s about bringing our community together to celebrate incredible food and support our area's chefs.

Get Involved: Looking for ways to connect? Volunteer with us! We’re seeking passionate individuals to help with outreach, event promotion, and community building throughout the month. It's a great way to meet like-minded people and make a difference! Volunteer using this link: TinyURL.com/VOLVCC.

Join us in making Kalamazoo an even more inclusive, vibrant, and compassionate community. For details on participating businesses, menus, partners, and more, visit our website at veganchefchallenge.org/Kalamazoo.

The Kalamazoo Vegan Chef Challenge is hosted by Vegan Outreach and in collaboration with Vegan Kalamazoo.