Massachusetts requires every cannabis licensee to file a Positive Impact Plan describing how the business will benefit communities disproportionately harmed by cannabis prohibition. It is a real requirement with real reporting behind it. It is also, in a lot of applications, three pages of language nobody intends to act on.

We would rather publish ours in ordinary words, before we are open, while it is still awkward to be measured against it.

Start from the actual history

Cannabis enforcement in Massachusetts was never applied evenly. Arrest and prosecution rates fell hardest on Black and Latino residents in communities across the state, for conduct that is now a licensed retail category generating tax revenue. That gap is the entire reason this requirement exists, and any plan that does not begin by naming it is decoration.

Hiring, specifically

Our commitment is to draw the majority of our staff from the towns immediately around the store, with deliberate priority given to applicants from communities the Commission has designated as disproportionately impacted, and to applicants with prior cannabis convictions that are now expungeable or no longer criminal.

Practically that means we do not screen out an applicant for a cannabis possession record, we write job descriptions without degree requirements the work does not need, and we post openings locally before we post them anywhere else. Retail cannabis is a genuine career path in this state. It should not only be a career path for people who already had one.

Expungement clinics

Massachusetts allows many past cannabis convictions to be sealed or expunged, and the reason so few people do it is that the process is unclear rather than expensive. We intend to host free expungement clinics with local legal aid partners at a regular cadence once we are operating, open to anyone, with no requirement to be a customer and no cannabis sold at the event.

This is the single most useful thing a dispensary can do with a room and an afternoon.

Where the money goes

We are committing a fixed percentage of annual net profit to organizations working in the communities the Commission has designated, with the recipients published each year alongside the amount. We are not naming a headline figure before our first year of operation, because a number invented by a business that has not opened yet is not a commitment, it is advertising.

What we will commit to now is that the figure and the recipients are published, in full, whatever they turn out to be.

The parts nobody enjoys discussing

A dispensary changes a street. Ours is planned for Sharon, and the fair questions are about odor, traffic, parking and who is standing outside at closing time.

On odor: carbon filtration on all air handling, with the system specified for a retail floor rather than the smallest unit that passes. On traffic and parking: a site plan reviewed with the Town, with staff parking kept off the surrounding streets. On the sidewalk: no consumption on or near the property, staffed enforcement of that, and a queue managed indoors rather than along the storefront.

On advertising: nothing near a school, nothing designed to catch the eye of anyone under 21, and no imagery that would look at home on a cereal box. Massachusetts already requires most of this. We would hold to it anyway.

How to hold us to it

We will report against this plan publicly each year: hiring numbers by category, clinics held and people served, contributions made and to whom. If a commitment on this page has not been met, that report will say so rather than quietly drop the line.

Our retail and delivery licenses are still pending with the Cannabis Control Commission and the Town of Sharon. Nothing here is approved yet, and none of it is a claim that it is. It is what we are proposing to do, published early on purpose.

If you live in Sharon and think something here is wrong or missing, the contact form reaches us directly.