NJ Cannabis Business Awards 2022: Excellence in Education winner revealed

On June 9, NJ Cannabis Insider will host the Garden State’s initial-ever Cannabis Business enterprise Awards gala, celebrating the people today and organizations that assisted shape the business. The black-tie affair at the Carteret Performing Arts Centre will be contrary to anything at all found prior to in New Jersey’s cannabis space. A Who’s Who of established and up-and-coming forged of power players will appear alongside one another for a person evening to identify excellence and achievements in the room in excess of the past 12 months. Get on the invite listing here.

While winners in eight classes will be discovered on the evening of the gala, we are saying the Publisher’s Choice awards in progress. Right now, we set a spotlight on the inaugural winner of Excellence in Training: Rob Mejia.

Rob Mejia is an adjunct professor at Stockton University in Galloway, a self-described serial entrepreneur who founded the education and learning firm Our Local community Harvest, and the writer of numerous books with the aim to inform the general public about the hashish plant. He’s also section operator of Backyard State Canna Collective, a woman organization organization (WBE) comprised of diverse associates that recently won a cultivation license in North Jersey.

“He goes earlier mentioned and beyond,” reported Ekaterina Sedia, professor of biology at Stockton University and coordinator of the Minor in Hashish application. “He’s by no means material to rest on what he has. He’s constantly hunting for much more ways to give.”

On the day the cannabis marketplace opened in New Jersey, a tireless Mejia moderated a discussion with much more than 40 professors from throughout the nation who joined him on Zoom to collaborate and focus on developing standards to train hashish at their campuses. Between the professors in attendance have been a number of from New Jersey universities, such as Rowan, Raritan and Montclair State.

“I’ve always thought in the energy of group,” mentioned Mejia, who life with his lifetime-prolonged spouse Beth Ann in Mahwah. “Community schooling for me is a single of the major factors.”

A 2nd-technology Mexican-American, Mejia was born in Denver, the sixth of 13 young children. He credits his household, a lot of of whom were being educators — his father a social science trainer and his mother a journalist — for his knack and deep generate to teach and inform. He still left Denver for Washington DC to show up at Georgetown College, in which he played best tier tennis for 4 several years whilst he pursued a liberal arts degree.

He leveraged his encounter in publishing at Georgetown to a position with renown publisher St. Martin Press, where by he worked carefully with school professors to create components they wanted for their classes.

He arrived to New Jersey right after a productive stint in Denver as an writer of a novelty ebook, which afterwards spawned a line of clothing, home furnishings and similar items. It is there where he begun his relatives. Mejia has six grownup children, all male, ages 33 to 20. Around the time Colorado was planning to open up its hashish sector, Mejia uncovered about the need for hashish training by a single of his sisters, who was performing study on health-related cannabis because she was battling most cancers.

At initially he released Our Group Harvest as a website in which buyers could study how to cook with cannabis. But he soon discovered that much too a lot of knew as well minimal about weed, so he pivoted to grow to be a useful resource for anybody searching for to master extra about the plant.

It was his instruction book, “The Critical Cannabis Reserve: A Industry Guidebook for the Curious” (Spring Residence Push, 2018), and his function with Our Neighborhood Harvest that convinced Stockton University to provide him on to expand cannabis experiments just after a fortuitous go to to Galloway throughout a campus pay a visit to with one of his university-aged sons. There, Mejia not only he assisted build a method that would introduce students to the cannabis company, he taught “Introduction to Professional medical Hashish.” Additional not too long ago, he begun his most bold study course, “Social Justice and Hashish,” which handles hashish historical past and prohibition, put together with notions of wellness inequality, revenue inequality, education and learning inequality.

But check with him what he’s been doing work on recently, and he’ll tell you in the most energized conditions how Stockton pupils recently planted hemp seedlings as portion of the Hashish & Hemp Research Initiative.

“My theory has often been that Stockton is executing good work, but I imagine that if there’s something I can do to reduce and shift alongside the entire education sector in New Jersey, that is only going to make us stronger and far better as we go ahead,” Mejia explained.

Enrique Lavin is publisher and editor of NJ Hashish Insider, a weekly subscriber-based on the web trade journal and functions group developed by NJ Advance Media, which also publishes NJ.com, The Star-Ledger and other affiliated papers. Comply with him on LinkedIn.