Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood serves as the beginning of an unorthodox yet beautiful friendship between local cannabis cultivation company Soulshine Cannabis and Emerald City Pet Rescue. “We wanted to make sure that our company was giving back somehow,” said Co-founder Mike Mercer who has 18 years of experience in Mortgage Banking.
Soulshine was aiming to donate a percentage of profits to animal charity due to an interesting connection between pot and pet, which Mercer claims, “one out of every two people that go into a cannabis retail store owns a pet.” Unfortunately, many were reluctant to associate themselves with the cannabis industry, with one potential taker having a board member object to the partnership by threatening to never donate any more money.
Luckily, Emerald City Pet Rescue had no scruples about taking money that came from marijuana sales. Soulshine has been donating 1% of their gross retail sales to Emerald City and has done much more. Vanessa Cason of Emerald City claims, “They’ve been amazing. Not only do they make significant donations, but they help out with events, fundraisers, and we get to help them out with vendor days around the city at various shops.”
The claim of cannabis lovers also being pet lovers proved to be correct as one of Belltown’s retail stores Have A Heart held a vendor day in which shoppers fawned over the adoptable rescue dogs brought on display by Emerald City as they browsed through wide selections of cannabis products. Mercer and Soulshine hope that other marijuana companies may follow their lead and grow cannabis for a cause.
L.C. Squared
