How Our Cannabis Giveback Program Put $143,790 Into Local Causes

The first time our team dropped off a donation at Bienvenidos Food Bank, the line outside wrapped around the block. This was a Thursday afternoon, hours before the pantry even opened. We stopped thinking of Be.Social Community as a program that day and started thinking of it as who we are. Over 16 straight quarters since 2022, our cannabis giveback program has put $143,790 into 13 local organizations across Colorado and New Jersey, and our customers never had to spend an extra dollar to make it happen.

What Is Be.Social Community?

The mechanics are simple on purpose. When a customer buys a product from one of our nine partner brands (Batch, Green Dot Labs, Harmony, Haze, Mighty Melts, Schedule One, Seed & Smith, Spherex and Wana), a portion of that sale goes to a featured local cause. Donations go out quarterly to organizations working on the three pillars our whole team helped pick: fighting hunger, supporting cancer survivors and serving veterans. Partners have included Food Bank of the Rockies, Community Food Share, Bienvenidos Food Bank, Parker’s Platoon and Ray of Hope.

It’s not a once-a-year check we write. The giving is built into transactions that happen in our stores every day, funded by products our customers were already buying, which is why it has never missed a quarter. Anyone who follows Colorado cannabis knows there have been plenty of quarters where a charity line item in a marketing budget would not have survived.

Building a Cannabis Giveback Program That Lasts

Our first quarterly donation, back when we had one store, was $1,100. Today the program generates more than $23,000 a quarter across our 10 locations in Colorado and New Jersey.

Getting there meant learning some lessons the hard way. When we launched, we added any brand that was willing to participate. We had 21 of them, and honestly, it didn’t work. Nobody could remember who was in the program or why it mattered. As we opened our second store, we restructured around the nine brands our customers already loved, and the donations nearly quadrupled within a year. If we could pass along one piece of advice to another retailer building something like this, it would be to curate instead of collect. Tying the giving to what already sells well works out for the participating brands, the causes and the customer, because nobody has to change their behavior for the community to benefit.

The scale today is bigger than most people assume. Close to 280 products in our stores carry the program, about 17% of everything on our shelves, including roughly 40% of our vape selection and 88% of our live resin products. Our customers bought more than 160,000 eligible units over the past year, which comes out to nearly a quarter of our packaged goods sales. Seed & Smith and Batch together generate over 40% of the donations, and the program responds when we put it in front of people. When we featured Wana and Seed & Smith in our 2026 Bingo promotion, the quarterly donation jumped 21.4%.

There’s a deeper reason this program exists. Social Dispensary got its start as Denver’s first licensed social equity dispensary. Somebody opened a door for us that stays closed for most people trying to get into this industry, and Be.Social Community is how we hold that door open for the neighborhoods around us.

Why a Cannabis Giveback Program Is Good Business

We spend a lot of time in our data, so here are the numbers that matter. The customers who buy participating products make up 36.8% of our customer base and drive 56.8% of our revenue. Among our top 10% of customers by spend, 64% have contributed to the program. They’re more likely to be loyalty members too, 45% compared to 33% of everyone else.

They’re also our most engaged shoppers. 54% of program purchasers make a return visit, against 33% of customers who never buy an eligible product, and their median time between visits is 76 days compared to 123 for everyone else. Even when we compare customers with the same number of visits, program purchasers spend about 30% more. And when we email our customers about the program, those messages get opened at a 56.1% rate this year, compared to 42.1% for our promotional and product emails. The story beats the discount every time we measure it.

What we’ve learned is that Be.Social Community works best when it amplifies the choices our customers already feel good about making. Rather than asking a casual shopper to change their habits overnight, the program gives our regulars an easy way to turn their everyday purchases into local impact. We built the program on the brands our best customers were already choosing, so their everyday shopping powers the giving whether they think about it or not. In a market where every competitor can match your price within a few dollars, this is one of the few things nobody can copy overnight. Customers can tell the difference between a company that cares about its community and one that just says it does. One more pattern worth sharing: the program appeals more to a younger buyer base, with 21-to-24-year-olds 1.18x more likely to buy a participating product, and that matches with the vape-heavy product mix more than the cause itself. We read it as room to grow as we add partners in more categories.

The Hardest Part: Finding Charities That Would Say Yes

Nobody warned us that the hardest part of giving away money would be finding organizations willing to take it. Early on we heard “we can’t take cannabis money” and “we’re not allowed to publicize a connection with a dispensary” more times than we’d like to remember. The federal status and the stigma around cannabis are real roadblocks, even in a state with a market as mature as Colorado’s.

The larger and more national the organization, the faster the no. What we found is that the smaller, hyperlocal organizations doing focused work in the same neighborhoods as our stores were far more open to the conversation, to the funds and to running public campaigns with us. Looking back, that pushback did us a favor. It steered the program toward causes our customers can see from their own front porch, and those relationships have grown into something real. We’ve now won Community Food Share’s Corporate Challenge two years running, going up against companies from every industry to see who can raise the most money, donate the most food and put in the most volunteer hours.

How You Can Get Involved

Every purchase of a participating product adds a portion of the sale to the quarter’s donation. There’s no extra cost and no extra step. Look for Be.Social Community products at any Social Dispensary location or browse eligible brands on our online menu. And if you run a local nonprofit focused on hunger, cancer survivor support or veterans’ services and you want to talk about partnering, we’d love to hear from you.

When you shop with us, you’re supporting a business that has put $143,790 back into the communities we share, and that number grows every quarter.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does the Be.Social Community cannabis giveback program work?

A portion of every sale from nine participating partner brands is donated quarterly to featured local organizations focused on fighting hunger, supporting cancer survivors and serving veterans.

How much has Social Dispensary donated through Be.Social Community?

$143,790 to 13 local organizations across 16 straight quarters since the program launched in Colorado in 2022, with quarterly donations growing from $1,100 at launch to $23,194 in the most recent quarter.

Which brands participate in Be.Social Community?

Batch, Green Dot Labs, Harmony, Haze, Mighty Melts, Schedule One, Seed & Smith, Spherex and Wana, with close to 280 eligible products across our stores.