MCA Featured on Honeysuckle Magazine
420NJEvents Brings Equitable Cannabis Education to New Jersey with the Minority Cannabis Academy
The pair behind 420 NJ Events will soon be expanding their educational repertoire to include the Minority Cannabis Academy (MCA), a free resource for those looking to learn about potential roles in the rapidly growing New Jersey cannabis market. The program is a non-profit workforce development program aimed at creating a more diverse workforce in the state's cannabis industry. In collaboration with Shaya Brodchandel, CEO of New Jersey’s Harmony Dispensary, the 420NJEvents team will be offering cannabis industry-related work training. This June, the program’s pilot will offer 8-week courses on budtending and cannabis cultivation for their first class of 25 students from Jersey City, Newark, and Irvington at Harmony Dispensary’s Jersey City location.
The MCA will provide a pathway for individuals that want to begin in the industry by working at a dispensary or cultivation facility. They plan to launch the program with three additional courses covering cannabis entrepreneurship, marketing, and law in the future. The MCA’s curriculum will ultimately help prepare minorities interested in the cannabis industry for various roles, including top-level CEOs, store managers, and cultivation directors. The MCA is making a powerful statement by focusing on bringing people from the communities most impacted by the War on Drugs into the cannabis industry as business owners and professionals. Their work continues to push the state to remember how crucial it is to build social equity into the foundation of the market, as a way to repair the damage done by decades of over-policing their communities. In correlation with the legalization of adult use, the state of NJ passed the CREAMM Act, which includes measures such as the expungement of people’s records for certain prior marijuana-related offenses. It also "directs the State Legislature to reinvest revenue from cannabis sales to initiatives such as financial support for individuals in Impact Zones".