BLACK FEAST WEEK 2026 · KICKOFF
Black Feast Week 2026 Kicks Off Wednesday With The People’s Buyout, Feeding 100 Black Single Mothers for Free
The Kansas City Defender is fully funding 100 meals at Daiquiri District on Wednesday, October 7 at 6pm, opening a week-long celebration of the World’s Greatest Food Culture. Your support is what makes nights like this possible.
THE TABLE IS SET FOR
Wednesday, Oct. 7 · 6:00pm
Daiquiri District, Kansas City
Until 100 families sit down to eat, on us.
SPONSORED & MADE POSSIBLE BY
Kansas City Central BankKansas City, get ready. Black Feast Week is back, and it kicks off this Wednesday, October 7, the same way it opened in 2024 and again in 2025: with The People’s Buyout.
At 6pm at Daiquiri District, The Kansas City Defender will fully fund meals for 100 Black single mothers and their families, offering them a night where they don’t have to be burdened with how they’ll feed their family, and instead get to enjoy the presence and love of community. Every meal is free. All 100 of them are on us.
100 MEALS. MADE POSSIBLE BY THIS COMMUNITY.
100 of 100 covered. Sponsored & made possible by Kansas City Central Bank.
Every circle is a mother and her family sitting down Wednesday night without a bill coming. Supporters like you are the reason every one of them is filled in.
And that is exactly where we need you. The People’s Buyout happens because this community shows up for it, and nights like Wednesday are only one piece of the mutual aid work The Defender carries year-round for Black families in Kansas City. If you can give $10, $25, $50, or $100 right now, you are helping make sure the next family fed looks like the 100 we will feed on Wednesday.
BLACK FEAST WEEK 2026 · GIVE TODAY
Help us keep feeding families.
The Defender is a Black-led nonprofit, and our mutual aid work for Black Kansas City is sustained by people like you, not by corporations or the city. Pick a table.
Support the next 100 mealsThe first People’s Buyout in 2024 at District Fish & Pasta became one of the most powerful moments of the inaugural Black Feast Week. There was a line out the door for three hours straight. Mothers came with strollers and toddlers and teenagers, sat down at tables surrounded by art of our own people, and ate without checking a receipt. Last year the line stretched outside the door again, and the second People’s Buyout fed 150 Black mothers and their families.
“Knowing that struggle with my mother, us three, my brothers and sister, how she had to struggle just to make a meal for us. It was powerful beyond words.” Leeko Khalifah, owner of District Fish & Pasta, after the first People’s Buyout
Monique Bowls, a single mother who attended, put it plainly.
“Some days I got this, and some days I don’t know what I’m gonna do. But this right here, it’s real powerful. What they’re doing here is strong. It’s giving people hope.” Monique Bowls, mother, The People’s Buyout 2024
Black Feast Week was built on the belief that community is at the heart of everything.
We host these events to bring our people together in joy, in a city so often plagued by violence, surveillance, racism and dehumanization. The People’s Buyout is where that belief shows up at the table first.
The inaugural Black Feast Week in 2024 reached nearly 1 million impressions across our platforms, ignited a surge of support for 16 of KC’s finest Black-owned restaurants, and captured coverage from BET, Black Enterprise, The Kansas City Star, KSHB, FOX4, KCTV5, KCUR, The Pitch, Startland News and more. Our Black restaurants were in a moment of crisis then, and the urgency to uplift our local Black culinary scene has only grown since.
As seen in
BLACK FEAST WEEK COVERAGE, 2024 & 2025
So come eat. Come celebrate. Come stand in line with us Wednesday at 6pm at Daiquiri District and help open Black Feast Week 2026 the way it deserves to be opened: with 100 families fed, and a full house of Black joy.
MUTUAL AID · THE KANSAS CITY DEFENDER
Wednesday is 100 families. Help us make it 100 more.
Your gift sustains The People’s Buyout and the mutual aid programs The Defender runs for Black people across Kansas City all year long. Give today and be part of the next table we set.
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