Community-based participatory research is a partnership approach to research that equitably involves community members, organizational representatives, and academic researchers in all aspects of the research process. The community organizations partnered on this study are Origins Council (OC), a California-based nonprofit public policy and research institute serving California's historic rural cannabis farming regions, and the Cannabis Equity Policy Council (CEPC), a statewide equity advocacy organization representing the interests of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) in urban communities.
The study is being collaboratively led by a multidisciplinary team of researchers, including Domini Corva, Ph.D., principal investigator and assistant professor of sociology and program leader of the cannabis studies major at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt; Genine Coleman, co-principal investigator and executive director of OC; Rachel F. Giraudo, Ph.D., co-principal investigator and associate professor of anthropology at California State University, Northridge; Todd Holmes, Ph.d., co-principal investigator and historian with the Oral History Center at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Eleanor Kuntz, Ph.D., co-principal investigator and co-founder of Canndor, a cannabis herbarium and co-founder and CEO of LeafWorks, a genomics and plant science company.
"This research seeks to empower and protect California's legacy cultivation communities who have overcome great adversity to innovate and steward one of the most important collections of cannabis genetic resources in the world," Coleman said.
Research outputs will include a special collection in Canndor herbarium; cannabis genomics data; a special collection cannabis herbarium; oral histories and ethnographic interviews; a series of educational webinars and publications regarding intellectual property tools for genetic resources; a suite of research-based public policy recommendations; and advancement towards research-based, community-driven consensus on the definition of legacy cannabis.
