Reddit’s largest cannabis community, r/trees, which recently passed 100,000 members, will soon spread its message of stereotype-busting “mature cannabis culture” offline with the creation of an educational non-profit, the section’s creator, Shaun Apple, revealed to the Daily Dot on Sunday.
Details are scarce at present, and the organization has no official launch date. But Apple said it already had acquired a panel of 72 volunteers, and a name: the International Cannabis Culture Education Forum.
“r/trees needs to stand for a greater purpose, not just where people type things on the Internet,” Apple said.
Apple said the organization’s mission would be to “introduce more people to the unique form of cannabis culture” of r/trees and to preserve some of the community’s best content in other media.
“Anything on the Internet could be real or not real,” Apple said. “It’s important to make leap from virtual world to reality.”
Apple said the organization will be based on a series of local branches, which will conduct much of its educational initiatives.
“There are people by my side who are ready to organize the local branches,” Apple said, “ready to develop the website, author the educational material and edit publications.”
With just over 103,000 members, r/trees is already the 27th largest community on social news site Reddit, which was founded six years ago.
It receives an average of 700 new subscribers a day and describes itself as the “most peaceful place on the Internet” where “mature cannabis culture merges with education to discuss activism, cultivation, industry, medicine, recreation, and science.”
“It’s a big community that feels like a family,” Apple said. “It’s amazing such a large online community can feel so close.”
The community has worked with other cannabis non-profits in the past, but this is its first effort to organize independently.
