The 1937 Group named itself after the year cannabis was weaponized against Black and Brown communities. SelassieFest exists to reclaim what that era tried to destroy — African dignity, plant sovereignty, and communal joy. There is no other cannabis company in Illinois whose name alone tells the full story of why this festival exists. This is not a sponsorship. This is convergence.
The 1937 Group named itself after the year the U.S. government weaponized cannabis prohibition against Black and Latino communities — spreading racist propaganda, enabling mass incarceration, and destroying generational wealth across neighborhoods like the very South Side blocks SelassieFest calls home. SelassieFest exists in direct conversation with that same history — a festival rooted in Rastafari's defiant embrace of the plant as sacrament, in African sovereignty, and in the liberation that prohibition tried to suppress. The 1937 Group didn't just enter cannabis. It named its wound and built from it. So did SelassieFest.
The 1937 Group is the first minority-owned, vertically integrated cannabis company in Illinois. It did not arrive at that distinction accidentally. It fought for it through a system — licensing, capital, real estate, regulation — specifically designed to keep people who look like its founders out. Every product it cultivates at Helios Labs, every flower it puts on a Chicago shelf, is an act of reclamation against the same machinery that 1937 set in motion.
SelassieFest's Ethiopian Heritage Village and Youth & Family Village are built on the same defiance — the insistence that African heritage, Rastafari livity, and the intergenerational passing of cultural memory are acts of resistance, not just celebration. The 1937 Group belongs inside those two districts not as a sponsor, but as a co-author. Their story and SelassieFest's story are the same story, told through different mediums: one through cannabis cultivation, one through drums and culture. Together, on July 25th, they tell it together — publicly, documentarily, permanently.
This proposal was prepared specifically for The 1937 Group. The alignment here is not manufactured — the name, the South Side roots, the liberation mission, and the craft grow story all converge at SelassieFest naturally. We review every inquiry personally. So do you. Let's talk.