Tauhid Chappell

Executive Director of NJ Dept. Of State's Cannabis Training Academy

New Jersey Business Action Center

Tauhid Chappell is the first Executive Director to lead the New Jersey Department of State's Cannabis Training Academy, the country’s first government-run program aimed at diversifying the cannabis industry by supplying free education, information and directional resources to prospective social equity, legacy, MWDV-owned, microbusiness or Impact Zoned businesses in New Jersey. Tauhid brings 10 years of experience in the cannabis space as a medical marijuana patient, a journalist who’s covered legalization efforts across the country, a former budtender for Philadelphia’s second medical marijuana dispensary and a current Adjunct Professor at Thomas Jefferson University, where he teaches the country’s first graduate-level course that studies the impact and outcomes of equity movements in the cannabis industry.
 
After organizing two cannabis conferences focused on media and equity in Philadelphia in 2019 and 2020, he combined forces with dozens of stakeholders and organized the Philadelphia CannaBusiness Association, Pennsylvania's first Black-owned, Black-led cannabis nonprofit aimed at healing the damage done by cannabis prohibition and mass incarceration. 
 
Tauhid also serves as an Executive Board Member and a credentialed Parliamentarian of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists, the first and oldest association of Black journalists in the country. An 8-year veteran of the media industry, he’s worked as a social media editor at The Washington Post, joined the Philadelphia Inquirer as an audience engagement editor, then moved to the Free Press, a media policy nonprofit focused on equitable access for broadband and internet, the break up of media conglomerates, equity and reparations in media.