NORML Vision Statement

My April, 2023 Statement in Application for Executive Director (excerpted)

NORML Executive Director Erik Altieri resigned in March, 2023. I put in my application for the position, which included a statement about my vision for the future of the organization, excerpted here.

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We are in a time of great opportunity for NORML because NORML must intentionally change as an organization, to meet its growing successes. I hope the board as a whole will find favor with my vision for restructuring and revitalizing NORML. It encompasses what I have learned in over twenty years of working with members, chapters, and fellow national directors, as well as my background as a social researcher and social movement theorist.

My activism has always been informed by my sociological perspective; I have spent my career in the praxis of informed social action to produce change. I understand NORML’s membership and culture from the inside. As with many NORML members, my motivation to reform activism came from an unpleasant personal experience related to my marijuana use under prohibition. Unlike many, I was already involved with a local NORML chapter doing field research. My experience inclined me to “go native,” and that has shaped my career path and life course.

I am a student of the movement, from its origins before NORML. I understand social movement through the mobilization of resources, financial and political, but most important for any marginalized peoples, culture. NORML needs to reclaim the cultural presence and cache it had when it was partnered with High Times, while appreciating cannabis consumer culture becomes quite different with repeal. NORML needs to make itself known and appealing to cannabis consumers enjoying legalization and channel their resources to marijuana reformers living under prohibition.

NORML must continue to be the leading source for non-commercialized information about cannabis, from scientific study, to law and policy, to consumer safety–this has been NORML’s most valuable service. NORML must build chapters and membership as vigorously as it must work to become self-sustaining in the coming decade. I propose NORML update its technological capabilities and modify its organizational structure so that it may remedy the funding problems that have recurred since its inception.

I have no magic formula for erasing the deficit. I only know to cut expenses, find the least-expensive means of fulfilling NORML’s mission, and increase solicitation requests among likely donors. I would spend most efforts in the first 100 days personally contacting donors, doing outreach to chapters and members, requesting NORML alumni in the industry bundle donations from their businesses and customers/clients, and doing publicity to raise general public awareness of the organization’s successes in legal states and its ongoing project to repeal prohibition.

NORML has repeatedly seen operational deficits because the organization’s funding strategy largely has been to rely on memberships and a couple large-sum donors. The board should seek an executive director who will institutionalize its funding mechanisms, especially now that we have the ability to draw support from a large population of legal consumers directly. As ED, this would be a central feature of my tenure, once the organization is returned to fiscal stability.

NORML needs to run a capital campaign with clear goals, incentives to invest, and outcomes that will provide NORML revenue-generating resources. The first round appeal would be fundraising to allow NORML to develop an app and platform that will give NORML unprecedented fundraising opportunities, member mobilization and reward capabilities, and give the organization real-time data on subscribers, members, and chapters. The platform will be customizable for other nonprofits with a similar national office/local volunteer chapter structure, and NORML will be able to license its use. In conjunction with the capital campaign, NORML will be running a membership drive, actively recruiting from among state-designated Social Equity qualifiers.

In addition to fundraising, I would develop partnerships with nonprofits such as Consumer Reports and other groups outside of policy reform to spread NORML awareness and appeal. We do not know much about our constituents, especially the newer ones to cannabis. NORML should engage in a member and chapter census as soon as practical; it should cultivate alliances with social researchers who are studying marijuana outside of prohibitionist rubrics. In short order, NORML should plot a strategy for offering our full suite of online, mobile, and in-person services to Spanish-speakers in the U.S. and the Americas.

As Executive Director I would bring a greater focus to bear on NORML’s operation as a nonprofit by diversifying and institutionalizing new income streams, bringing chapter operations under national administration, finding ways to better capture and channel donations, and greatly improving the ratio of administrative costs to the value of services provided. NORML will begin dedicating greater amounts of resources toward fundraising than ever before, along with the goal of identifying as many adult cannabis consumers as possible, asking each of them to join us and making that as easy as possible.

My overall goal is to expand NORML’s membership, resource pool, services, and influence. To position the organization such that it no longer runs into crises caused by its own successes, because there will be more. To have its members again set the cultural vanguard vis-à-vis cannabis. To broaden its appeal such that cannabis consumers who don’t know anyone ever touched by prohibition will still see NORML as something they want to belong to because it enhances their experience as consumers.