Lelehnia DuBois

Lelehnia Dubois is a daughter of the back-to-land movement. Her mother started homesteading deep in the heart of the Emerald Triangle in 1977. She has experienced raids, family homelessness, death, kidnapping, and rape, all results of the drug war, making her not want anything to do with cannabis as an adult. In 1999, she sustained a life-changing spinal cord injury and began to implement the alternative healing tools her mother taught her after seeing western medicines were not working. Nature, cannabis, and community were two of those tools. Lelehnia now believes the plant is a large part of her ability to thrive and sees it as a vehicle to help create positive change. Lelehnia was trimming by age nine but didn’t start growing until 2005, when she became a provider for a local dispensary, The Hummingbird Healing Center. After nine years in the medical market, she became the first Chair and President of a political organization, California Cannabis Voice Humboldt (CCVH), leading the local cannabis farmers, business owners, and politicians to the same table in Humboldt County. In 2015 she became concerned about where she saw legalization going and started to look for ways to educate and empower around the community values she was taught growing up with the plant, love, and grace. By 2021 Lelehnia had sponsored a cannabis education spot that aired on national networks; developed a 4-permit manufacturing project in Humboldt County; launched Sensi Magazine in the Emerald Triangle; hosted three groundbreaking cannabis events in Humboldt County in the streets of Eureka, and at the Humboldt County Fair; helped build the largest women’s network in the industry, Women Empowered In Cannabis; developed and lead Women Empowered in Cannabis: Supply Chain; hosted a weekly podcast series for two years called “Business Our Way”; served on the Humboldt County Human Rights Commission for five years, authored the county human trafficking fund, and was the Chair for her last year in 2020; created the online community The Humboldt Grace: A Cannabis Community Gathering Place; Founded Humboldt Grace, a Dream Maker of The Ink Peoples—working as a non-profit, creating projects like The Humboldt Grace Fire Recovery Project. An online art, collectibles, and gifts auction to help the communities impacted by the 2021 fires in the Emerald Triangle rebuild; Founded the Humboldt Grace Legacy Project, a collaborative group of breeders, cultivators, scientists, and technologists creating pathways to protect, authenticate, and validate genetics through an auction event. In 2022, Lelehnia was asked to join Canopyright, a team building a unique blockchain ledger technology that protects cultivars while making licensing agreements accessible for cannabis breeders.