You Won’t Get Ahead Professionally If You Start Burning Bridges, According to Mary Pryor

08.12.2022 - 21:29 / glamour.com

At Glamour we talk to a lot of important women—, , , and the occasional . And while they span the professional spectrum and live all over the world, we’ve found that high-ranking women tend to have one thing in common: They’re truly excited to hold the door open for the women coming up behind them. In our series—part of our coverage—we asked some of those industry leaders to welcome the next generation to the table with their hard-earned life and career advice.

Mary Pryor, a cofounder of , shares hers below.Mary Pryor didn’t like what she was seeing in . She didn’t like that less than 3% of cannabis businesses were Black-owned. She didn’t like hearing conversations about cannabis that were more about privilege than wellness.

And she hated when cannabis-business owners announced new programs to equalize the space, and then never followed through on their promises.So she did something about it. Pryor cofounded , which works to amplify underrepresented voices in the cannabis world. (That work has included hosting workshops on cannabis education, creating , and connecting founders with funding.) “There’s a lot of these really, really bad practices that are driving the need for accountability and supporting and coaching in the industry,” Pryor says. “We need to be supporting the brands that are already doing that work.

And if they’re not, then people need to know.”Even as a child, Pryor liked the idea of holding people accountable, and for a while she considered becoming a lawyer. She landed instead in an array of digital media and marketing jobs—with a client roster that included Sony Music Group, Viacom, and more—helping them reach multicultural audiences and raise the voices of diverse leaders. Her professional path from