NJ Cannabis Business Awards 2022: Excellence in Education winner revealed
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On June 9, NJ Hashish Insider will host the Back garden State’s initial-ever Hashish Business Awards gala, celebrating the people and companies that served condition the market. The black-tie affair at the Carteret Accomplishing Arts Centre will be in contrast to just about anything found right before in New Jersey’s cannabis place. A Who’s Who of recognized and up-and-coming solid of ability gamers will appear collectively for just one night time to identify excellence and achievements in the area in excess of the previous 12 months. Get on the invite checklist in this article.
Though winners in eight groups will be uncovered on the night of the gala, we are asserting the Publisher’s Option awards in progress. Currently, we place a spotlight on the inaugural winner of Excellence in Education and learning: Rob Mejia.
Rob Mejia is an adjunct professor at Stockton University in Galloway, a self-described serial entrepreneur who established the education and learning company Our Community Harvest, and the author of several textbooks with the intention to notify the community about the cannabis plant. He’s also aspect owner of Backyard Point out Canna Collective, a girl organization business (WBE) comprised of numerous companions that lately gained a cultivation license in North Jersey.
“He goes above and further than,” said Ekaterina Sedia, professor of biology at Stockton College and coordinator of the Minor in Cannabis application. “He’s never ever articles to rest on what he has. He’s generally searching for much more ways to give.”
On the working day the hashish marketplace opened in New Jersey, a tireless Mejia moderated a dialogue with far more than 40 professors from throughout the region who joined him on Zoom to collaborate and go over producing criteria to train hashish at their campuses. Between the professors in attendance have been many from New Jersey universities, together with Rowan, Raritan and Montclair State.
“I’ve normally considered in the power of neighborhood,” mentioned Mejia, who lives with his lifetime-lengthy spouse Beth Ann in Mahwah. “Community schooling for me is one of the massive issues.”

Rob Mejia, an adjunct professor at Stockton University, talks about schooling the long term workforce in the cannabis business for the duration of NJ Cannabis Insider’s meeting at the Carteret Carrying out Arts Middle on Sept. 23, 2021. Carteret.Aristide Economopoulos | NJ Advance Media
A second-technology Mexican-American, Mejia was born in Denver, the sixth of 13 kids. He credits his household, many of whom have been educators — his father a social science trainer and his mother a journalist — for his knack and deep travel to teach and notify. He still left Denver for Washington DC to show up at Georgetown University, exactly where he performed prime tier tennis for four many years though he pursued a liberal arts degree.
He leveraged his encounter in publishing at Georgetown to a work with renown publisher St. Martin Press, wherever he labored intently with university professors to create supplies they necessary for their classes.
He arrived to New Jersey after a thriving stint in Denver as an author of a novelty reserve, which later on spawned a line of attire, home furnishings and related goods. It’s there exactly where he started off his family members. Mejia has six grownup young children, all male, ages 33 to 20. About the time Colorado was preparing to open its cannabis industry, Mejia discovered about the need for hashish training as a result of one particular of his sisters, who was performing study on clinical hashish simply because she was battling most cancers.
At to start with he introduced Our Neighborhood Harvest as a website in which buyers could discover how to cook dinner with hashish. But he soon located that way too numerous realized much too little about weed, so he pivoted to turn out to be a resource for anybody trying to find to study a lot more about the plant.
It was his education e book, “The Vital Cannabis Book: A Industry Tutorial for the Curious” (Spring Residence Press, 2018), and his do the job with Our Group Harvest that certain Stockton College to carry him on to extend cannabis experiments after a fortuitous check out to Galloway all through a campus check out with 1 of his college or university-aged sons. There, Mejia not only he assisted build a method that would introduce students to the hashish business, he taught “Introduction to Professional medical Hashish.” Additional recently, he started out his most bold course, “Social Justice and Cannabis,” which covers hashish record and prohibition, put together with notions of health inequality, profits inequality, schooling inequality.
But talk to him what he’s been performing on recently, and he’ll notify you in the most energized terms how Stockton pupils a short while ago planted hemp seedlings as element of the Hashish & Hemp Study Initiative.
“My concept has constantly been that Stockton is accomplishing good do the job, but I assume that if there is everything I can do to cut and move alongside the full training industry in New Jersey, that is only going to make us more powerful and better as we go ahead,” Mejia mentioned.
Enrique Lavin is publisher and editor of NJ Hashish Insider, a weekly subscriber-based mostly on the internet trade journal and events team produced by NJ Advance Media, which also publishes NJ.com, The Star-Ledger and other affiliated papers. Follow him on LinkedIn.
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