The Marijuana Herald – Marijuana news and information
A group of academic researchers, scientists, and community-based organizations today announced the launch of a first-of-its-kind, multidisciplinary, community-based participatory research (CBPR) study for cannabis agriculture.
Funded by a $2.7 million grant from the California Department of Cannabis Control, the project incorporates public education and CBPR to implement the standard methods and systems used across agriculture to define, document, and legally protect as intellectual property the individual and collective genetic resources of legacy cannabis breeders and legacy cannabis cultivation communities.
“The CBPR model is a partnership approach to research that equitably involves community members, organizational representatives, and academic researchers in all aspects of the research process,” explains UC Berkeley historian Dr. Todd Holmes, one of the researchers on the project. “For a historic project like this, it’s absolutely vital that the community is a partner in the design, implementation and analysis of the research.”
The community-based organizations partnered on this study are Origins Council (OC), a California nonprofit public policy and research institute serving California’s historic rural cannabis farming regions, and the United Core Alliance (UCA), an organization created by social equity advocates to serve disadvantaged communities adversely impacted by the war on drugs.