Daily Dose
A Day in the Life of ...
Kristen Everhart Curaleaf's Regional Marketing Director's Life and Work Revolves Around the Plant. For the past two years, Las Vegas resident Kristen Everhart has been Curaleaf’s Regional Marketing Director, overseeing all marketing initiatives for the western region of the country, including Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and California.. Everhart grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, earning a Bachelor of Arts in Communications, Advertising, and Public Relations at Grand Valley State University in Allendale. She spent 12 years after college working for a small radio station cluster before moving to Las Vegas, Nevada. “After a few more years of working in media marketing in Vegas, I left and joined the Hard Rock Hotel’s marketing and promotions team,” she said. “I had worked with brand invention through an agency and one of the clients I worked with was a cannabis company in Canada - I knew pretty quickly that was the market I wanted to be in.” After answering an ad for marketing manager, Everhart said CuraLeaf brought her on board, working her way up to Marketing Director of the West Region. Curaleaf is a vertically integrated cannabis operator that’s been around for a decade, serving 350,000 patients in 93 local dispensaries, with 22 cultivation sites, 30 processing sites, and 1,150,000 active wholesale dispensary accounts, across 23 states; with a wide range of premium, medical grade products. The company prides itself on being a “family of advocates and educators from diverse backgrounds,
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with a shared love for the power of cannabis.” Curaleaf also believes in giving back to the communities it serves, forming partnerships with local entities for positive impact. One such outreach came in the way of baskets delivered to hospitals during COVID, filled with masks, hand sanitizers, and sealed food items for health care workers. It’s website refers to the plant as an ancient entity that brings people together, and Everhart’s first time trying cannabis reflects that philosophy.
Daily Dose, for work and play Her journey into cannabis began ahead of the cannabis company gig, long before she even became a certified cannabis patient. “My first experience with cannabis was in my early 20s,” she shared. “I was living in Grand Rapids, Michigan, at the time. My first time probably mirrors many other’s. My friends and I were at the Pine Knob Music Theater, now known as DTE Energy Music Theater near Detroit. It was during a Dave Matthews concert, and we danced, we laughed, and we hugged everyone around us. Cannabis has been in my life ever since.” But her cannabis use isn’t all festival fun, as Everhart suffers from chronic back pain, caused by herniated disks, made worse by arthritis. “I spent a short time on opioid painkillers and muscle relaxers - which made my day-to-day life even more challenging than it already was, while in pain,” she shared. “I was working fulltime in an office, collaborating with colleagues, and my head was fuzzy on the opioids.” Back surgery, in the way of a discectomy, helped, but slowly, she said, she discovered that regular cannabis use, coupled with holistic treatments for pain like yoga, meditation and Chiropractic care could successfully keep her off the pain meds. According to Medlineplus.gov, a herniated disk is a ruptured
