IG LIVE Joint Conversations: Cannabis & Mental Health

Instagram Handles:

@aliareichert & @ginagault

@Illinois_women_in_cannabis

Alia Reichert is a Field Marketing Associate for Nature’s Grace and Wellness and collaborating partner with Hope for the Day (HFTD). She is a HFTD education team member, as well as an HFTD Agent of Impact. Alia went to Millersville University in Pennsylvania to become a teacher. Upon graduation Alia worked as a classroom teacher at a Title 1 school in Annapolis, Maryland and in several other school communities out East. In total, Alia has over 18 years of education experience.

Alia and her family moved to Chicago in 2012 where she continued to work in education, as an assistant to students with special needs, as well as the after-school coordinator for the YMCA. During this time, Alia became an active volunteer with Hope for The Day, earning her the title of HFTD Agent of Impact. She believes that mental health education is critical and has always had a passion to spark the conversation with peers.

Later leaving the public education sector, through her work in mental health as an Agent of Impact Alia followed her aspiration to learn more about how cannabis could help people as she watched support for this approach grow in Illinois. She immersed herself in learning about cannabis and landed a job at first at a medical cannabis dispensary giving Alia her first opportunity to educate others about the plant. Wanting to take her cannabis knowledge and passion for teaching to another level by incorporating all she had learned working with HFTD, Alia decided to leave the dispensary.

In leaving the dispensary, Alia began working for Nature’s Grace and Wellness, an Illinois cannabis cultivator, spearheading a specialized version of HFTD’s peer-led proactive suicide prevention and mental health education for the cannabis community and industry. She currently leads this one of a kind HFTD x NGW collaboration, Spark The Conversation About Mental Health education and outreach programming in hopes of meeting as many people where they are at as a way to prevent further loss of life.

Alia Reichert currently resides in the western suburbs of Chicago with her husband of 10 years, her college-aged stepson, and her fur babies Ula and Onyx.