The anti-vaccination movement is having a devastating impact on New Yorkers, with 359 confirmed cases of measles since Friday, according to the New York Daily News. To deal with parents who refuse to vaccinate their children, New York State senators from the Democratic side of the aisle are launching a campaign they…
Citing the deadly dangers of lies and the noise of false rumor, Sri Lanka has instated an emergency lockdown as they begin to track down the international network responsible for a deadly Easter morning attack.
For any black person who has worked, lived or spent copious amounts of time in majority-white spaces, last night’s episode of Game of Thrones probably triggered a bout of PCSD (Post Caucasian Stress Disorder). Luckily, our weekly “Black Person’s Guide to Game of Thrones” is here to break down the ten rules of…
If there’s one thing Americans of all stripes seem to agree on, it’s that the education system is broken: school districts are increasingly segregated and disproportionately funded at the K-12 level, and the cost of college educations—touted as an essential step toward economic advancement—has become increasingly…
I spent my Easter Sunday deviating between inhaling jelly beans and watching Kanye pass out communion wafers through a peep hole. But it looks like recording artist, community activist and serial entrepreneur T.I. spent his Resurrection Sunday being far more impactful.
When confused philosopher king Kanye West rapped, “racism’s still alive, they just be concealing it...” on “Never Let Me Down” from his debut offering, The College Dropout, he was not talking about Mississippi. Or Alabama or South Carolina or, well, you get the point. Regarding Mississippi specifically, it is the last…
Homeowners: you need a pressure washer, spend a few minutes Googling “satisfying pressure washing” or r/pressurewashingporn, and you’ll have your credit card out. And today, Amazon, Lowe’s and Home Depot are marking down a whole army of ‘em.
Frankly, the shock is not so much that two Virginia police officers from separate jurisdictions were caught tied to two distinct, respective white supremacist groups, but that they were fired after said affiliations became known.
The Trump administration and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler have failed African-American communities. Earth Day is the ideal time to renew our commitment to ensure everyone has equal access to clean air and safe environments regardless of which zip code they live in. It is also a time to…
io9 On Game of Thrones, Everyone Gets Ready to Fight the Dead...and to Die | Lifehacker How to Watch the Lyrid Meteor Shower Monday Night | Jalopnik At $3,900, Does This 1990 Ford Taurus Mean it’s SHO Time? | Kotaku A New Mod Adds CJ And Big Smoke From GTA: San Andreas Into Resident Evil 2 | The Takeout The Instant…
As the city of Chicago lurches forward with its lawsuit against actor Jussie Smollett, John Legend penned a blistering op-ed last week, taking aim at Chicago’s powerful police union.
Prior to his shocking death in 2016, The Purple One was working on a memoir. And while he didn’t live to execute his vision, it looks like he’ll be blessing us from beyond the grave on October 29.
Tumblers and travel mugs are usually two separate things, but this model from Atlin combines both beverage receptacles into one. And today, it’s just $17 thanks to Amazon’s Gold Box. Available in five colors, the tumbler features two layers of insulation to keep hot drinks hot and cold drinks cold. Plus, there’s…
Root Staff Writer Jay Connor told us days ago that “Karma has a GPS,” and it turned out to be more factual than we thought. New reports have surfaced stating that Kodak Black is blaming his most recent legal troubles on his GPS system.
Rossi Lorathio Adams II, the 26-year-old founder of media company State Snaps, faces up to two decades in prison for hiring an intruder to break into a house in Cedar Rapids, Iowa to force the transfer of an internet domain at gunpoint, according to CNN.
With droves of research suggesting education is one of the most effective tools to rehabilitate those currently serving sentences behind bars, Congress is trying to do something to make education more available to inmates.
It’s officially beach season, and if you aren’t happy with your current cooler collection, Arctic Zone’s well-reviewed soft side models are 20% off on Amazon this week.
Karimah Guion-Pledgure had been an employee of Multnomah County, Ore. since 2011 when her employer put up a “Blue Lives Matter” flag in the workplace in 2017.
The sighting of a man previously thought to have been killed by law enforcement officers has sparked a number of theories and set Black Twitter on fire with both praises of wonder and joy.
Download Marie Kondo’s book for $3, grab a new cooler for your next beach trip, save on an Echo Show with a free Hue bulb, and more.
Malissa Ancona, 46, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in St. Francois County Court in Farmington, Mo., according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Bernard Arnault, chairman and chief executiveof Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy (LVMH), loves Rihanna as much as the rest of us. He loves her ability to bring in boatloads of money even more.
According to Black Enterprise, the Thurgood Marshall College Fund (TMCF) and Hennessy have partnered to announce a $10 million HBCU scholarship initiative.
Kerry Lathan, 56, was on parole when he was shot alongside Los Angeles rapper and entrepreneur Nipsey Hussle, born Ermias Asghedom, on March 31.
Larry Mitchell Hopkins, the 69-year-old leader of the United Constitutional Patriots, an armed border militia group spreading conspiracies and rounding up asylum-seekers along the U.S.-Mexico border, has been taken into custody by the FBI.
Donald Trump seems to be rebounding from the Mueller report just fine.
John Singleton’s family confirmed the iconic filmmaker’s stroke to E!News on Saturday.
For true 70’s and 80’s babies the phrase “He likes It! Hey, Mikey!” is forever etched into your etch-a-sketched minds. The famous ad campaign for Life cereal ran for over a decade starting in 1972, and now, in 2019, The Quaker Oats brand is hoping to find its new iconic Mikey.
The Grenco G Pen Elite was already one of the best ground material vaporizers for the money at its usual $120 according to both Gizmodo and The Wirecutter, but now, you can get it for just $72 right now during the company’s sitewide 4/20 sale, in addition to deep discounts on the company’s other vapes and accessories.
Last week, Emmanuel Aranda allegedly threw a five-year-old boy from the third floor of the Mall of America in Minnesota, according to authorities.
Washington, DC, is in the midst of a culture war between the new residents who want to mold the city into their own version of VanillaTown and the folks who didn’t ask for any of this shit but now have to defend their ways of life. Yes, we’re talking gentrification. From new residents of Chinatown trying to stop the…
A $399 Samsung TV, a huge sale on Anker charging products, a keyboard that charges itself with light, and several CBD and vaping deals for 4/20 lead off Saturday’s best deals from around the web.
Today, April 20, marks an annual focus on all things cannabis. For some, recreation in the form of smoking or consuming edibles is the vibe, but for others, cannabis is the golden ticket in a $7.5 billion market, with more than half of that being medicinal. Larry Smith, co-CEO and co-owner of GFive Cannabis Cultivation in Las Vegas, is part of the latter, but with a twist: With his cannabis cultivation business, he’s building family legacy, reinvesting in low-income communities, and paying it forward—seeking to contribute to a different, more positive narrative of minorities and cannabis.
“We’ve got the licensing to cultivate cannabis, and we’d like to cultivate community as well, Smith says.
The GFive staff, which includes Smith’s wife, Maribel, his business partner, Shawn Holman, and their sons, celebrated their first crop in February after embarking on a four-year process to get the business up and running. They’ve been going full steam ever since, attracting support from entertainment and marketing mogul Damon Dash (who also serves as chief marketing officer of the company), and supplying safe, premium cannabis products for the medical market in southern Nevada.
Smith, a real estate entrepreneur, owns a community center in the neighborhood where he was raised, Las Vegas’s Berkley Square (a historic area where the first subdivision by and for African Americans in the region was built), and he plans to continue carrying the torch of African American pride in community through this latest venture.
GFive’s 8,591-square-foot facility was designed from the ground up to cultivate a product that is incorporated into remedies for patients suffering from diseases including cancer and HIV, and Smith takes great pride in his motivation for even getting in the marijuana game. Smith stresses that GFive, which was launched with a $3 million investment by him and his partners, is part of a continuation to contribute to the proud heritage and improving the outlook for the future’s black business leaders.
(Photo: LJ De La Roca)
“[Launching a cannabis cultivation business] is an awesome feeling. We [understand] that we represent the urban youth of America, and to come into Nevada, represent as well as we do, it’s an awesome feeling,” Smith says. “Also, to have people who looked you in your eyes and said, ‘Man, I don’t think y’all are going to be able to pull this off; and to know we did it with pride and integrity and honesty—that’s a very fulfilling feeling for us.”
The business is also a labor of love that Smith hopes to pass down as a way to build generational wealth. “I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit. I always wanted to leave my kids something beyond a life insurance policy. It’s been beautiful to bring it all together for our family,” Smith says. ” My wife Maribel, has an M.B.A. and is very smart. She did all our [licensing and business] paperwork… the research. She helps to make sure we’re on point with regulations and all those things. My son handles packaging and logistics, and Shawn’s son does growing. It’s been nice to walk in the room to see our sons on harvest day and they’re playing music and enjoying themselves. They’re working knowing one day this all could be theirs—if they choose to take it. It’s a beautiful thing.”
Smith sees the business as a way to promote the pursuit of lucrative and socially responsible careers for minorities in the cannabis industry. “We want to be able to expand to create jobs, and we want people [of color] to [understand] that this is a market they can get in[to],” he says. “It doesn’t just have to be an owner standpoint. There are other things they can do; packaging, clothing. We want kids to go to school for biology, horticulture, agriculture. If you can grow a tomato, you can grow this plant. I hope I can spawn the next scientists to find the cure for chronic pain.”
Though covering startup costs can be quite expensive—a challenge Smith sees as part of a systematic problem set up to keep many minorities out of the cannabis business—he recommends black entrepreneurs pool their resources to get the capital needed to start. “Don’t be afraid to pull together and put your money together. If you have strong leadership, you’ll be successful, ” he says. “It’s important we don’t get left behind. Our people still have that negative connotation that [marijuana is] bad. And it’s obviously because we’ve been getting incarcerated for it and so we still don’t believe that [the legality possibilities are] real [for us]. I think we should catch up, get focused, and not be afraid to tell our kids it’s OK to go to school for agriculture in this field.”
Editor’s note: This article originally published on April 20, 2018.
The post Cultivating a Legacy: GFive Co-Founder Talks Why More Black Entrepreneurs Should Get Into Cannabis Growing appeared first on Black Enterprise.
It’s 4/20 and high time for cannabis-infused beauty. According to a recent WWD report Google searches for cannabidiol (CBD) reached an all-time high in March; the most asked question: what is CBD?
Members of a local militia in New Mexico apparently decided to take matters into their own hands regarding this nation’s immigration policy and detained a group of asylum seekers at gunpoint before turning them over to U.S. Border Patrol.
A Florida man has been charged with making death threats against prominent Democratic officials, including Sen. Cory Booker, and Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, and spewing hateful invective against blacks, Muslims and immigrants in a series of phone calls.
The current Black Panther title is a fascinating sci-fi remix of Wakandan concepts and characters, taking readers away from Earth as T’Challa finds himself in the middle of an intergalactic war with no memory of his past. He’s surrounded by new versions of significant figures from his past, and he’s getting closer to…
Just in time for National Weed Day, aka 4-20, aka tomorrow, April 20, the Carl’s Jr. burger chain is bringing out a special offering—one that could whet the appetites of those who may have the munchies after deciding to indulge in a little bud.
The home owners have spoken, and Delta’s Touch2O edged out the trendy Kraus Nola to take the title of our readers’ favorite kitchen faucet.
It’s no secret that veteran White House correspondent April Ryan and White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders don’t have the most collegial of relationships, and now Ryan has vociferously called for Sanders’ resignation.
People who read the Clapback Mailbag often ask how I can stomach wading through the morass of emails, tweets, comments and direct messages each week. It is true that they are often filled with hate, grammatical errors and ignorance, but the reason I love Fridays is simple:
Three years after breaking into the popular consciousness (if not the Billboard charts) with “Good As Hell”—a song that you’ve probably heard, even if you don’t recognize its title—Lizzo’s time has come. Freshly signed to Atlantic Records, Lizzo specializes in R&B/pop empowerment anthems in the Beyoncé mold, with a…
We see a lot of deals around the web over on Kinja Deals, but these were our ten favorites today.
After evaluating testimonies and assessing surveillance video of a February road rage incident that erupted into violence, felony assault charges against Sgt. 1st Class Kai Waters, 33, have been dismissed.
A new season inevitably means a new skincare routine is in order. First Aid Beauty understands your skin’s needs, and to prove it, they’re taking 20% off a selection of the best products for spring. I’m a big fan of the brand’s gentle Ultra Repair Face Moisturizer, now down to $20, and you may also want to consider…
On Thursday, Attorney General William Barr held a press conference early in the morning to tell everyone how much he loves and respects the president. Fine, he held a press conference...who knows why he held a damn press conference, but he did and it was stupid.
