BENNINGTON — Colleen McQuade is the owner of Bennington's first retail cannabis business, Juniper Lane and together with Colleen Begley of Atlantic City, N.J. the two are embarking on the journey to open another women-owned cannabis dispensary in New Jersey.
Plans for developing the new location are now underway with help from one of the new N.J. Economic Development Authority (NJEDA) $150,000 Cannabis Seed Equity grants. McQuade and Begley received the grant earlier last month in June, and the Juniper Lane name will now be making a trek down to New Jersey, following in the footsteps of Colleen Begley.
Begley is a close friend and business partner of McQuade. The two met through a mutual friend.
"When I was pregnant, a mutual friend of ours asked me to give Colleen and her daughter a ride to a festival. My friend was like, 'You're about to be a mom, too; you both can be lifelong friends,' and then that's what happened. So we've just kind of been lifelong friends since then, and we travel together. We usually take our kids, like, on vacation every year together; we're both single moms, so it works out really well," said Begley.
Begley said she attributes the new opening to McQuade's encouragement and inspiration.
"I have to credit Colleen McQuaid with [the idea]. Part of her vision for her business in the cannabis space is to help other women enter the cannabis space, particularly those like myself who have been incarcerated for cannabis."
Colleen Begley served years in New Jersey's prisons for marijuana violations. The new grant comes following Begley's completion of the New Jersey Cannabis Technical Assistance Program in May, and in early June, the very first round of funding arrived.
Begley and McQuade will use the grant to support the opening of their completely woman-owned retail store and delivery service in Atlantic City. They have already secured a location, and several City Council resolutions in New Jersey are supporting their site.
"Colleen asked if I wanted to partner with her and bring what she's done in Vermont to New Jersey. There's nobody better I would rather partner with than Colleen. We share a lot of these same ideals about social justice and being a consumer-friendly cannabis spot with access to it for all types of different people," said Begley.
Begley thinks that aspects of Juniper Lane's emphasis on social justice played a part in receiving the grant.
"In New Jersey, I was very involved in the passing of both the medical and recreational cannabis laws here. I was a volunteer lobbyist with the Coalition for Medical Marijuana of New Jersey. One of the things I asked them for when they set up this new industry here was that people like me have a pathway to be able to open a business. And New Jersey actually has done just that. They want to be a leader in social equity in the cannabis space, and we're one of the first states to have written into our law from the door social equity components. So we're pretty cutting edge in our law here in New Jersey. We've kind of become like the poster children for social equity in the cannabis space, and that's definitely how we got the grant," explained Begley.
Juniper Lane now has a cultivation license in Vermont, and McQuade is the Chair of the Cannabis Retail Association of Vermont.
The shared ideal of Colleen Begley and Colleen McQuade is to help women who served time in jail or prison open small cannabis businesses.
"It's been hard," commented Begley on the transition from being incarcerated to becoming a business owner. "Colleen and I grinded through it with her experience working in corporate cannabis. She's kind of a master of that end of it."
Begley said New Jersey state officials and groups helped open up programs for workshops on business ownership which helped get things running for Juniper Lane's sister location.
"I didn't know how to open a business, so the state put together this cannabis Technical Assistance Program. They call it the CTAP program, and it was a partnership with Oaksterdam University. It was an eight-week program that was online, and we had a couple of workshops in Trenton, which were really great. I got to meet other social equity grant winners. We're trying to get a good business network going for us to be able to survive against the MSOs, big multi-state guys. I mean, we're technically an MSO because we're multi-state operators, but we're smaller and local, too."
Begley said the ambition was overall just starting step's in McQuade's overall mission, and that they hope to be pioneers in the field of equity.
"We want to see stronger social equity programs to help people like us and other states too. We were kind of like pioneers of this, and we want to pave the way for others to follow," said Begley.