Chelsea Higgs Wise

Executive Director

She/Her/Hers

Chelsea Higgs Wise is a 36-year-old Virginian who is grateful for the village of public school teachers that raised her. She is a mother, a social worker, and a community organizer, committed to unearthing Black history and who firmly believes that there will be no peace without justice. Chelsea was raised in Chesterfield, Virginia and bounced the county/city line as a child of divorced parents. She saw two different worlds between the county and Richmond City — completely different communities only miles apart. She attended the University of Richmond, where she met some of the wealthiest people she had ever seen, who were only 18 years old. After a year, she switched her university, location, and major in order to graduate with a social work degree from Longwood University. She went on to a masters of social work at Virginia Commonwealth University, and proudly served her community for ten years in the mental health industry. But in 2015, after the death of Sandra Bland, Chelsea's career began to transition to a more macro community perspective. She realized that many aiming to do the work were well-meaning white people who had the desire to shape their racial equity lens, but Chelsea wanted to be involved in creating a mechanism to empower Black communities economically and educationally, because "we are the work, and we have the answers." Intersecting her origin story, which includes her father being incarcerated due to nonviolent drug offenses, with recent events like Virginia's grapple with the latest racist scandal in February 2019, Chelsea rallied with some of the most incredible minds to birth a Black-led platform that is rooted in historic storytelling, political education and providing a POC space aimed at collective power that benefits us all. Marijuana Justice.

Ed Miller

President

He/Him/His

Born in Richmond, raised in Chesterfield, Ed Miller comes from a family of educators. At one time, he, both of his parents and his sister all taught. His mother and sister taught special education and his father worked with the department of correctional education. After getting his engineering degree from the University of Virginia, he taught high school math. While teaching, he found he was more passionate having conversations with his students around life than around math. So he got his graduate degree in counseling. He worked part-time as a counselor while doing full-time analytics. Now, he still enjoyed teaching math, so he started a math tutoring business, working with students from elementary age through college. While he isn't seeing clients for counseling or tutoring now, he still places a high value on education. Ed now leads operations analytics for a financial technology firm that's one of the fastest growing companies in the nation. Each day, he makes it a point to teach the "why" as well as the "how" for the work that they do. Outside of full-time work, he's gotten into real estate investing, which has helped him hone his skills in learning markets and how to problem solve differently. While his background may be a bit eclectic, two things Ed consistently brings to the table are knowledge of business and a knowledge of data. He wants Marijuana Justice to be at the table when key conversations happen around drug education, drug policies, and what to do with revenue generated from marijuana legalization.