Every adult-use cannabis licence in Massachusetts arrives with an obligation attached. Applicants file a Positive Impact Plan with the Cannabis Control Commission and negotiate a Host Community Agreement with the town, and both are conditions of operating rather than gestures made afterwards.
That framing matters. It is the difference between a business that gives something back once it is comfortable and one that was permitted on the understanding that it would. Ours is the second kind, and we would rather set out what we have committed to now, before we open, while it can still be held against us.
Hiring starts close to home
Recruitment begins in Sharon and the neighbouring towns. We cover the cost of state-required agent registration and training for everybody we bring on, which removes the quiet barrier that keeps these jobs circulating among people who already hold the certificate.
A cannabis retail job should be a job somebody local can actually get, not one that requires having worked in cannabis already.
A fixed share of profit, decided locally
We set aside an agreed share of annual profit for local causes. What separates this from ordinary corporate giving is who chooses: recipients are selected with input from our staff and our neighbours rather than decided in an office, and we intend to publish where the money went each year.
A number nobody can check is a marketing line. A published list is a commitment.
Equity in an industry that owes it
Massachusetts built Social Equity and Economic Empowerment programmes into its cannabis law precisely because enforcement of the old law fell very unevenly, and the people most affected were then the least able to get a licence when it changed.
We work with those programmes, and we hold open interviews for applicants affected by prior cannabis convictions. It is a modest thing set against the scale of the problem. It is also the specific thing available to a single retailer in Sharon, so we do it rather than write about it.
Education with no till attached
We run free sessions on safe storage, dosing and impaired driving, open to residents whether or not they ever buy anything from us. No purchase, no sign-up, no pitch at the end.
Some of the people who come will never be customers. Parents wanting to know what an edible package looks like so they can recognise one at home are, to us, exactly the right audience. A town that understands what is being sold on its high street is better off than one that does not, and that is true regardless of where anybody shops.
How we expect to be held to it
Publish the commitments, publish the results, and accept the awkward conversation when the two do not match. If you think we have fallen short of anything set out here, the contact form reaches us directly, and we would rather hear it from you than not hear it at all.
