From Cannabis Consumer….
Full Title: From Cannabis Consumer to Advocate and Entrepreneur
Kiana Hughes, Founder of Elevated Education, LLC
Becoming a major player in the Illinois cannabis scene was not a part of Kiana Hughes’ 10-year plan.
Kiana began her career as a curriculum developer, creating educational materials and online courses for adult learners in industries outside of cannabis.
Today, she is a dedicated advocate for cannabis legalization and the founder of Elevated Education, LLC, an Illinois-based consulting firm serving the cannabis industry.
Kiana’s journey is an invitation to explore the economic opportunities regulated cannabis continues to create. Keep reading to learn how Kiana found her way.
Step 1: Enter the Cannabis Space as an Advocate
Kiana’s interest in cannabis evolved when a friend asked her to help form a Women Grow chapter in Chicago.
“I didn't know anything about cannabis as an industry at the time. I was just a consumer,” Kiana told us.
As she became more involved with Women Grow, she gained an awareness of two facts:
First, she recognized that legal cannabis presented people with medicinal and economic opportunities.
Second, it became clear that a lot of people—especially people of color—were unaware of these opportunities.
“I really started off just doing community outreach and giving free presentations so people could know to apply for the medical cannabis program and that it could help them,” Kiana said.
“We weren't talking about that in the Black community at all even though we have all of these different health conditions and are taking all kinds of medicine to fix these problems. Cannabis was an alternative and nobody knew about it.”
It’s no coincidence that the majority of people arrested for cannabis possession are Black while white-owned corporations maintain disproportionate control of the regulated industry.
Cannabis prohibition has been one of the most effective arms of structural racism, exacerbating poverty in Black communities, disenfranchising thousands of voting-aged Black adults, and perpetuating a powerful stigma against any type of cannabis involvement, including regulated.
The result? Black people, who experience disparate negative health outcomes largely believed to be responses to the stress of being Black in America, are separated from the powerfully therapeutic benefits of medical marijuana.
Driven by her devotion to the community and a deepening understanding of the cannabis industry, Kiana sought to address the educational gap by creating the DOPE Show, a podcast breaking down cannabis issues.
Through her work in the cannabis community, Kiana developed relationships with other advocates who noticed the absence of BIPOC voices in the space. In 2017, she and other like-minded organizers established the Chicago chapter of NORML with the intention of addressing that lack of representation.
“We are specifically focused on elevating the cannabis plant and industry in Black, Brown, and marginalized communities. Whether that's from an ethnic, racial, or economic standpoint, that has been our main focus since we started,” Kiana said.
Step 2: Explore Ancillary Cannabusiness
When she wasn’t engaged in cannabis advocacy, Kiana worked as an independent contractor developing training curriculums for professionals in a variety of industries. While working with a mortgage compliance training company, something occurred to her.
“If you're a mortgage loan officer, you need to have training, be licensed, and renew every year,” Kiana said. “I was like, you know what? This is going to happen in the cannabis industry.”
Kiana began to ask people working in cannabis about the training they’d received, and she quickly found that they hadn’t. Most of the cannabis entrepreneurs she spoke to were flying by the seat of their pants.
This was a clear, industry-wide problem. Kiana made it her business to become the solution.
“I left home, I left my husband and my kids here in Illinois, and I moved to Oakland for three months to go to weed school,” she said with a laugh.
Kiana enrolled in Oaksterdam University, America’s “first cannabis college,” on the other side of the country to take a 16-week long cannabis business course.
Around the same time that Kiana returned from Oakland and launched Elevated Education, Illinois’ adult-use cannabis law was well on its way. When the law passed, Kiana was prepared to offer consultation and training services to license-seeking cannabis establishments.
Elevated Education is an ancillary cannabis business. She provides cannabis brands with training and application consultation and offers classes to consumers who want to learn more about the industry.
Because her business doesn’t touch the plant, Kiana can operate it without a cannabis-specific license, a type of permit that can cost thousands of dollars to acquire. This is why Kiana encourages prospective cannabis entrepreneurs to consider ancillary opportunities.
“There's only going to be so many dispensary owners and cultivation centers. Some places have unlimited markets, some places don't,” Kiana said. “I really, really advocate for and encourage people to use the businesses and skills they already have—to figure out how to do those things for the cannabis industry.”
Starting with Advocacy is Essential
Before adult-use cannabis was legal, Kiana and advocates like her took matters into their own hands with the power, connections, and resources they had.
The outcome was no small feat. Illinois passed an adult-use cannabis law in 2019, and one of its flagship provisions is a comprehensive social equity program. Kiana acknowledges that the program isn’t perfect, but she’s confident that she and the advocates she worked with did one thing really well: they got social equity into the bill’s text.
Kiana encourages anyone who is interested in the cannabis space to get involved in the advocacy side, even if that’s not in their comfort zone.
“You need to read and understand the law in a way that you might not be comfortable with or know anything about. I didn't know anything about any of this,” she said. “I was just living my life and doing my thing. But if you’re really trying to make a difference in this space, you have to do that.”
Learning about the industry through advocacy taught Kiana how to advocate for her community and prepared her to enter the space as an entrepreneur herself. Cannabis wasn’t a part of Kiana’s professional plan. Plans change, though, and sometimes that’s exactly what we need.
Marijuana Matters is a non-profit centering those disadvantaged by the criminalization of marijuana. M2 identifies and eliminates barriers to economic opportunity in the regulated cannabis industry through advocacy, entrepreneurship, and education. Support our work.
