Portland observer., March 06, 2019, Page Page 6, Image 6

Page 6
March 6, 2019
A Reversal
of
Fortunes
C ontinueD from f ront
has helped her business greatly.
“We’ve been able to move into
a better position, re-assess our
needs, and be able to meet some
of the needs we already had, like
marketing and things like that. So
that’s been amazing,” Kennedy
said.
Kennedy runs the dispen-
sary with her business partner
Karanja Crews, and together,
they launched what it called “the
world’s first hip-hop dispensary,”
at its grand opening last year.
Green Hop also runs an educa-
tional program for youth of color
who are of legal age under Ore-
gon’s legal marijuana laws, and are
interested in working in the canna-
bis industry. Green Hop Academy
facilitates hands-on training in the
cannabis profession, classes, as
well as setting up students with re-
al-world internships in every area
of the cannabis business—from
growing to budtending.
Economists have found dis-
parities between the success rates
of white and black businesses is
in large part due to the smaller
amount of capitol that’s accessible
to black entrepreneurs. Acording
to an investigation by Buzzfeed
in 2016, less than one percent of
cannabis dispensary owners na-
tionwide were black.
In Portland, the NuLeaf Project
was founded by an African-Amer-
ican couple to help communities
of color thrive in the legal can-
nabis industry. The nonprofit was
selected by the city to manage
and disperse grants funded by the
city’s marijuana tax.
“NuLeaf and the City of Port-
land are addressing the economic
harm caused by cannabis crim-
inalization while also funding
growth businesses that are typi-
cally overlooked,” said Jeanette
Ward Horton, NuLeaf’s executive
director.
Adrian Wayman, the founder
and chief executive officer of Port-
land’s Green Box delivery service,
described how coming up short on
capital was something that inhib-
ited the growth of his company.
photo by D anny p eterson /t he p ortlanD o bserver
Kaitlyn Verret is employed as a budtender, helping customers pick from a selection of legal cannabis
to purchase for recreational use at the Green Hop dispensary, a black-owned business on Northeast
Killingsworth Street.
Getting financial support from
Portland’s dispensary taxes was a
leap forward and an unbelievable
opportunity, he said.
The economic justice invest-
ments Portland makes from its
three percent cannabis tax, an ini-
tiative that was passed by voters in
2016, is also meant to reverse dis-
parities in communities of color in
terms of the impacts from mari-
juana criminalization in the past.
In the nine years prior to canna-
bis legalization in Oregon, African
Americans made up 21 percent of
cannabis-related arrests in Port-
land while accounting for just six
percent of the city’s population.
In addition to investments in
cannabis businesses and jobs
training, revenues from the mar-
ijuana tax are meant to help ex-
punge cannabis convictions. Port-
land is the first government in the
U.S. to leverage cannabis tax rev-
enue in this way.
Kennedy, who grew up in the
neighborhood where the dispen-
sary now stands, said seeing this
kind of community reinvestment
is meaningful to her after see-
ing the area go through so much
change over the years.
“I know people very close to
me who have been impacted by
the war on drugs,” Kennedy said.
“Being able to be here and to have
funds reinvested back into the
shop has just been very powerful
to me,” Kennedy said. “We’re
reinvesting it back into the shop
to dig our stake deeper into the
ground to say we are going to stay,
we’re going to be here.”
In a video on NuLeaf Project’s
website, Wayman recalled the iro-
ny of recently getting finger-print-
ed to get his retail license to sell
cannabis for his delivery service,
remembering that 10 years earlier
he had been finger-printed after
getting arrested for pot possession.
“And now, today, fast-forward,
I’m receiving a grant to sell the
same thing that I got arrested for.
Like, that’s mind blowing, that’s
a true full circle. It shows that
the community wants to fix the
wrong,” he said.