Built on equity.
Rooted in community.
Funded by you.
How it started
Social Dispensary opened as Colorado’s first licensed social equity dispensary — a business built on the belief that the people most impacted by cannabis prohibition deserved a seat at the table in the legal market that replaced it.
That belief didn’t stop at the business model. It extended into how we thought about our role in the neighborhoods where we operate.
In 2022, we asked ourselves a question: What if every transaction at Social didn’t just benefit the customer and the company — but also the community around the store?
The answer was Be.Social Community.
We went to the brands we carried on our shelves and proposed something simple: for every unit of your product we sell, contribute twenty-five cents to a local nonprofit — and we’ll match it with another twenty-five cents from Social Dispensary. We’ll handle the logistics. We’ll pick the organizations. We’ll make sure the money gets where it needs to go. All you have to do is say yes.
Nine Colorado brands said yes. The first quarterly donation was $1,100. It went to Ananeo — a Denver nonprofit helping formerly incarcerated individuals find dignified housing and a path forward. It wasn’t an enormous number. But it was real. And it was a promise that we’d be back next quarter with more.
As the program grew, so did the family behind it. Fireplace Dispensary also participates in Be.Social Community — every qualifying purchase at a Fireplace location feeds the same quarterly donation fund.
How it’s going
Four years later, Be.Social Community has donated over $120,596 to 13 organizations fighting hunger, supporting cancer patients and people with disabilities, serving veterans, sealing criminal records, empowering the Latino community, building neighborhood connections, and caring for 21,000 homeless animals a year.
Fourteen brands now participate — nine in Colorado and five in New Jersey. The quarterly donations have grown from four figures to over eighteen thousand dollars. Community Food Share became the first organization invited back for a second quarter. In Q4 2025, we crossed the $100,000 cumulative milestone. And in Q1 2026, Bienvenidos Food Bank received $18,053.50 — our largest single-quarter donation ever.
None of this was inevitable. It happened because brands chose to participate. Because customers kept shopping. Because we kept showing up, quarter after quarter, and writing the check.
The industry that owes the most
There’s an irony in a cannabis company running a community giving program — and we don’t shy away from it.
For decades, cannabis was criminalized in ways that devastated the very communities we now serve. People lost jobs, housing, freedom — over a plant that’s now legal and profitable. Social Dispensary was founded as a social equity business specifically to address that legacy.
Be.Social Community is an extension of that founding purpose. We believe the cannabis industry has a unique obligation to give back — not just because it’s good business, but because the communities that bore the cost of prohibition deserve to share in the benefits of legalization.
That’s why Expunge Colorado was one of our earliest recipients. That’s why Ananeo — helping formerly incarcerated individuals find dignified housing — was our first. The connection between cannabis and criminal justice isn’t abstract for us. It’s foundational.
“When we started Social, people told us the community stuff was nice but it wouldn’t scale. That we’d drop it once things got hard. We’ve donated over a hundred and twenty thousand dollars. Things got hard plenty of times. We never missed a quarter.”
Sher Joudeh · Co-Founder, Social Dispensary