Spenta Mehraban of Grown Women Good Weed: Creating the Belonging Her Family Fought to Find

When I sat down with Spenta Mehraban of Grown Women Good Weed, I thought we were going to talk about women in cannabis, community building, and the impossibly fun events she helps create. We did. But somewhere in the middle of our conversation, another story emerged—one about a father carrying his infant daughter toward safety, a family rebuilding its life across countries, and a little girl who grew up to create the same kind of belonging her father once created for their Afghan community.

Who Is Spenta Mehraban?

Spenta is a marketer, community builder, and one of six founding mothers behind Grown Women Good Weed, or GWGW. Alongside Katie, Lindsey, Anissa, Gabi, and Diana, she helps create social experiences where women can connect without feeling like they have to perform a particular version of cannabis culture.

Consumption can be part of the experience, but it isn’t a requirement.

That distinction matters to Spenta. She grew up as an immigrant in a predominantly white community and remembers what it felt like to be one of very few people of color around her. Later, being surrounded by more diversity helped her understand the difference it makes to see yourself reflected in the people around you.

Today, GWGW intentionally tries to create that sense of welcome for others.

"We're not just throwing parties. We're actually here to build a community."

That philosophy shows up everywhere from GWGW’s craft gatherings and wellness events to the women-focused spaces like the Women's Lounge at Hall of Flowers.

But to understand why creating places for people to belong seems to come so naturally to Spenta, you have to go much further back.

Spenta Mehraban, Grown Women Good Weed and a Family’s Search for Safety

Spenta was about six months old when her family fled Afghanistan in 1993. She doesn’t remember the journey herself. Much of what she knows comes from the story her father wrote in Farsi, which Spenta translated while she was in high school.

Her father was a history professor and an outspoken advocate for human rights and women’s rights. He held seminars, protested, and participated in activism opposing the Taliban. Spenta says one of his former students learned that her father and his family were in danger and warned him. Her father came home, gathered what the family could carry, and they left.

What followed is the kind of family history Spenta had lived before she was old enough to form memories.

She describes a passage from her father’s story in which he is moving through a tunnel with his six-month-old daughter, focused on keeping her alive. At another point, the family was smuggled on a truck as they traveled from Pakistan toward

Russia.

And then there is one small detail I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

During that journey, someone sitting near the family began clapping and making a drumbeat. Spenta, still a tiny child with no understanding of the danger surrounding her, began dancing, giggling, and enjoying the music. Her father later told her that in the middle of an incredibly difficult moment, watching this innocent little girl dance brought joy to the people around them.

"We left everything. We had nothing. And we went to a whole new country."

The family spent time in Pakistan and later Russia, rebuilding their lives as they went. Eventually they came to America, where Spenta has now spent the majority of her life.

Looking back, she recognizes something her older siblings never had in quite the same way: stability. Spenta is the youngest of six. By the time she was growing up in America, she was able to remain in one town, move through one school system, earn her bachelor’s degree, and eventually pursue work she loves.

Her older siblings had experienced something very different. They had spent years moving and starting over, and some sacrificed their own educational opportunities to work and help their parents support the family. Spenta talks about those sacrifices with enormous gratitude.

"I lived a life before I even had memories, and I didn't even know it."

Her family’s journey also gives Spenta a deeply personal perspective on what America represents. She doesn’t pretend the country is perfect, nor does she romanticize the American Dream. What she values is the possibility of change—the idea that the circumstances someone is born into do not necessarily have to dictate the rest of their life.

When she considers what women in Afghanistan are facing today, that distinction becomes especially meaningful to her. For all the challenges she sees here, America remains the place where she believes she has greater freedom, opportunity, and the ability to build a different life.

Creating the Place Where People Belong

Then, during our conversation, something clicked.

We were talking about what it had been like for Spenta’s family to arrive in America without most of their extended family nearby. I asked whether there had been an Afghan community for them to connect with.

Spenta suddenly remembered that her father hadn’t simply found one.

He had helped create one.

Her father became president of an Afghan community organization that gave families a place to gather, maintain their culture, and celebrate traditions that weren’t represented in the schools and communities around them.

And right there, in the middle of our conversation, Spenta made the connection.

"My father started an Afghan community out there and now that I think about it, he was literally doing what I'm doing with GWGW now."

There it was.

The father who once carried his infant daughter toward safety later helped create a place of belonging for Afghan families building new lives in America. Decades later, his daughter is creating belonging in her own way.

For Spenta Mehraban Grown Women Good Weed is where community can look like pink parties and craft tables, wellness events, cannabis education, or simply being able to walk into a room and know you’re welcome there.

She also brings that philosophy to Hall of Flowers. After watching women naturally gather around a women-focused installation at the show, Spenta began taking photos. She used those images to make the case that women didn’t simply need a photo opportunity—they needed an actual space to gather, connect, network, and be visible.

That work continues today.

Grown Women Good Weed will once again create its Women's Lounge when Hall of Flowers comes to Sacramento November 4–5, 2026. The gathering gives women throughout cannabis a place inside the larger event to meet one another, discover each other’s work, and build relationships.

For Spenta, collaboration is central to that vision. She doesn’t want one women’s organization to own the room. She wants women’s groups to gather there. She wants women-owned brands to be discovered there. She wants the people doing important work behind the scenes—cultivators, marketers, executives, creatives, founders—to be seen.

And perhaps that is why this work feels so natural to her.

The community her father created and the community Spenta is creating are separated by generations, circumstances, and cultures. But underneath both is the same instinct: when people need somewhere to belong, help create it.

"I am a lot like my father."

I think she’s right.

We weren't able to capture video for this one but you can listen to my full conversation with Spenta Mehraban on The Canna Boss Babes Podcast to hear this remarkable story in her own voice—from her family’s journey out of Afghanistan to cannabis, Grown Women Good Weed, and the communities she is helping build today.

And if you’re headed to Hall of Flowers Sacramento November 4–5, look for Spenta and the women of Grown Women Good Weed and experience some of that community for yourself - along with a little crafting and a ton of photos - at the Women's Lounge. See you there babes!