Get Sidebar Using Formats

yes, but you need custom php coding to make this work eg. https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/taxonomy-events-categories-cannot-output-em_category?replies=4

Thank you very much for your swift response Angelo.

The post you pointed me to, was exactly what I was looking for!

Suppose stepping out of my comfort zone and diving into the template structure is the best way to achieve true integration.

To get it working I first had to turn off formatting for events categories.

The code above is from my theme category.php template. I copied that template to my child theme and renamed it to taxonomy-event-categories.php, as the plugin author suggests here:

https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/plugin-events-manager-single-category-template

I then replaced the above code snippet with this:

<div class="col-sm-8 col-md-9">
<?php
   global $post, $EM_Category, $wp_query;
   $EM_Cat = em_get_category($wp_query->queried_object->term_id); ?>
<?php echo $EM_Cat->output('#_CATEGORYNEXTEVENTS'); ?>
</div>
<div class="col-sm-4 col-md-3 sidebar">
   <?php get_template_part('templates/sidebar') ?>
</div>

Once again, thank you so much for your help Angelo.