Get Baked Edibles Basics Course – with Jesse Marie from Baked by the River

Join us for an informative free online course as we get back to our roots: baking and educating.

We will be going over the different routes of consumption, types of edibles, safety recommendations, dosing, and a cannabis infusion tutorial for anyone looking to bake along!

DATE: Tuesday 8/22 5-6PM
LOCATION: Zoom

ABOUT YOUR TEACHER:

“Bake the world a better place.”

Growing up in central New Jersey, Jesse Marie Villars had no idea how deeply that statement would define her life.  Side by side with her mother in the kitchen, she learned to bake both traditional Scandinavian and American meals. Immersed in the sensory experience of preparing dishes from scratch, Jesse was able to separate herself from some of the not-so-pleasant dynamics of her young adult life.  

 On June 1st, 2023, Jesse, the majority owner, and founder, received an annual license from the state of New Jersey for her microbusiness, Baked by the River.  The retail dispensary, located in Lambertville, New Jersey, is the first social equity license awarded by the city. Villars oversees all of the operations for the small city’s first social equity cannabis dispensary.  Her mission to educate, and ultimately open a dispensary started well before her application was submitted. Villars was fueled by her first-hand experiences as a patient and her own opioid addiction which stemmed from abuse at the hands of a former employer.  Literally bedridden from an auto-immune version of multiple sclerosis in 2014 with doctors offering her more opioids, Villars chose to utilize medical cannabis instead.  This furthered her belief in the importance of advocating for expanded conditions for New Jersey’s medical cannabis program.  She did the one thing she was physically able to, participate in the New Jersey Medical Marijuana Program (NJMMP) expansion letter-writing campaign that led to expanded qualifiers in 2018. Coincidentally, one of the expanded qualifiers included doctors’ ability to write prescriptions to ease opioid addiction withdrawal.

Jesse has worked closely with the city, as well as the state, throughout the licensing process – focusing on clearly defining not only the need to support social equity applicants but also to deflate the 80-year stigma of cannabis when cannabis prohibition was the racially-targeted mission of Henry Anslinger. 

Her commitment to helping others began over a decade ago, when she spent a year volunteering in Ghana at an orphanage and group home for children and adults with severe disabilities, and later spent two months in La Paz, Bolivia volunteering at El Centro de Miembros Artificiales, an organization that provides prosthetic limbs to amputees.

In her efforts to ‘bake the world a better place’, Jesse learned about the art of infusing food as a means to prepare medicine for sick and terminally ill members of her local community.  She is passionate about cannabis, its benefits, and sharing her knowledge through classes. She is also the co-founder and a board member of the People’s Equity Project, a non-profit dedicated to creating a path to employment for individuals unjustly incarcerated for cannabis.