🔒Under new leadership, cannabis industry’s troubled Social Equity Council looks to relaunch community grants program, create closer ties with marijuana entrepreneurs

While he was a state legislator representing Hartford, Brandon McGee helped draft the bill to legalize recreational cannabis use in Connecticut.

That legislation included the idea for the Social Equity Council (SEC), the body charged with helping approve cannabis businesses, reinvesting the financial windfall from startup license fees into programs that help communities most impacted historically by drug arrests, and overseeing a startup loan fund.

Now, some four years later, McGee finds himself heading up that body as its executive director.

“It’s a full circle moment for me,” said McGee. “I am extremely fortunate to be in this position to help reimagine communities most hit by the war on drugs. So that said, there was no hesitation” to take the job.

No one would have blamed McGee if he had hesitated, because he took the council’s reins at a time of turmoil.

The Social Equity Council’s inaugural executive director, Ginne-Rae Clay, resigned last July amid disagreements over how the organization operated and distributed an initial $6 million in community reinvestment grants, which went to various nonprofits, including churches and youth groups.

That infighting — among state lawmakers and the council’s staff and board — prompted the governor to order a full audit of the SEC.

Social Equity Council chair Andrea Comer — who had initially resigned from the role, before being asked back — says at least some of the early problems weren’t a surprise.

The Social Equity Council, she said, came together quickly and was developing its policies and procedures on the fly, which led to growing pains early on.

The governor’s audit — carried out by Comptroller Sean Scanlon’s office — came to several conclusions.

It recommended that the council overhaul its process for approving social equity plans from cannabis licensees.

Such plans must detail how prospective cannabis companies will give back to communities hit hardest by drug arrests.

The audit also recommended the SEC formulate an ethics plan for its own staff, and establish better criteria for its community grants program so that it can properly demonstrate the impact of disbursing millions of dollars.

It also suggested that the grant process be paused until the issues were addressed. That moratorium is still in effect.

“I was actually grateful for the comptroller’s review because it almost forced everyone to say, okay, if this thing is gonna survive, we’re gonna have to take a step back and really be thoughtful, and we’re going to have to start rowing in the same direction,” Comer said.

Staffing up

Part of that reset — even before Scanlon’s findings were released — was the appointment of McGee, who took on the executive director position in July 2024.

He says his first order of business was to get everyone on the same page, particularly leveraging his relationships with legislators in the General Assembly’s Black and Puerto Rican Caucus. Their buy-in is key because the bulk of future grant funding will be targeted at communities they represent.

“Having those relationships has really allowed me, quickly, to stabilize, get folks focused, create an open door policy to just talk about some of the challenges that the organization had been faced with,” he said.

The next move was partnering with business and technology consulting firm Slalom to undertake a strategic review of the council’s operations.

That six-week process came up with four key areas for change: staff and organizational culture; more closely integrating the 17 appointed council/board members; measuring the impact of community reinvestment; and enhancing the SEC’s work with cannabis entrepreneurs.

Those changes won’t happen all at once, says McGee, who is targeting a three-year implementation period. Reorganizing the SEC’s internal operations and staffing up the effort has so far been one of his top priorities.

“As you can imagine, you can’t do this work without human beings,” he said.

From a headcount of five when McGee was appointed, the organization now has 13 funded positions. He just hired a legal director, and is in the process of hiring a loan program manager. Both are key roles that will support cannabis entrepreneurs from marginalized communities, McGee said.

“We’re talking about individuals standing up companies for the first time ever, having backers and reading all of these really scary documents,” he said. “We want to be of support.”

The SEC has a $50 million revolving loan fund that it can lend to startup businesses.

McGee also wants to bring on board the entrepreneurs who the council was already supporting — many of whom had spoken to the comptroller’s office about their difficulties with communication and vague expectations.

“We’re really quickly meeting with a lot of our current social equity entrepreneurs to help address their pain points,” McGee said.

Comer, too, has those nascent businesses top of mind.

“This is a very expensive industry to be in,” she said. “The legislation itself was not written in a way that would automatically benefit social equity applicants.”

According to Comer, some of the issues with the original legislation come from the fact it was written in consultation with large, multistate players already successful in the cannabis business, who set the expectations for scale.

The council is discussing whether some funding for small entrepreneurs could be converted into grants, because people who currently come to them often do not have the collateral to take out large loans.

Next round of grants

Beyond entrepreneurship, the council is also tackling the job of creating a cannabis industry workforce. McGee said they are in talks with the community college system to help stand up cannabis certificate programs at two campuses by providing both expertise and funding.

And then comes the community grants program, which is still in the process of being refocused before it’s rolled out for a second round. During the pilot, the SEC partnered with community foundations and other grant-making bodies to identify recipients and manage funds.

One of the biggest criticisms from legislators last year was that the council’s approach seemed scattershot, with little hope of proving any positive outcomes.

Through a new process, the council by the end of the current fiscal year will issue a request for proposals for grant managers. Once those managers are identified, SEC staff will work with them to craft an application for community organizations.

The council — which sits under the state Department of Economic and Community Development — has already adopted its own criteria for how the next round of grants might achieve a focused economic impact: workforce development, support for the formerly incarcerated, and youth programming.

McGee said he hopes to have much more measurable outcomes this time, but he doesn’t have any illusions about the scope of the problems in these areas. He says it would be a mistake to see the council as the solution “to every woe, every plight throughout the state of Connecticut.”

“We’re very focused on the types of organizations who support our impact areas, helping us to meet the outcomes that we projected,” he said.