‘Dream big’: Cannabis workers search for new futures as Emerald Triangle economy withers

GARBERVILLE — Leann Greene’s rose-colored glasses are scratched, cracked, sitting askew, but still firmly planted on her face during her latest monthly open house for the Humboldt Workforce Coalition.

For three hours this Wednesday afternoon in a sunny conference room at the public library, apprehensive cannabis workers, lured by a segment on the community radio station KMUD, trickle through, seeking a potential refuge from their collapsing industry. Greene is their counselor and confidante, a relentless cheerleader promoting new career opportunities.

“So dream big. It’s your life, right?” she tells one young man looking for help connecting to job possibilities in a place where there don’t seem to be many right now.

It’s a mantra for Greene.

“You’re kind of reinventing your life here, so dream big,” she tells Daniel Rivero, who fears he could lose his job at any moment after his hours were cut back at the small warehouse where he manufactures cannabis products for $17 an hour.

A crash in the price of weed over the past two years has sent California’s cannabis market reeling — and with it, the communities that relied economically on the crop for decades, even before the “green rush” of commercial legalization.

In the Emerald Triangle — the renowned Northern California region of Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity counties that historically served as the hub of cannabis cultivation for the state and the country — growers who can no longer sell their product for enough to turn a profit are laying off employees and shuttering their farms. The cascading financial impacts have left local residents with broken dreams and a daunting question: If not cannabis, then what? Read more >>>