By Sheldon Baker, Area Code 42004.13.23
Sister Kate moved to the Central Valley of California in 2008, following a financially devastating divorce. Previously, she spent most of her career working as a project manager in de-regulating industries.
Arriving in California while the laws were allowing cannabis commerce, she and her brother began a collective, where they delivered cannabis to the sick and dying. While doing this work, Sister Kate began formulating teas and tinctures, gentler ways of ingesting the medicine, which quickly grew to 15% of sales.
Inspired by the reaction to non-smokable forms of the medicine, Sister Kate began exploring non-psychoactive strains of the cannabis plant. She was also determined to create jobs and leadership opportunities for more women like her.
In the fall of 2014, she harvested her first crop of non-psychoactive cannabis and formulated her first line of products. The sales from the products have sustained the Sisterhood for eight years now, and those first products are still the Sisters’ best-selling products.
Area Code 420 (AC 420): Interesting approach to branding your business. Are Sisters of the Valley Catholic nuns?
Sister Kate: I think some of the sisters might argue that the plant branded us, not the other way around. We are not Catholic nuns, but we all have a calling to work with plant-based medicine. That calling is what brings us together. The work keeps us together.
The dictionary definition of a nun is that they live together, work together, pray together, and take vows. Our order qualifies, even though we remain, like our Beguine ancestors, unaffiliated with a particular religion. We are spiritual and scholarly women, and such an affiliation would inhibit our work.
AC 420: Describe the sisterhood and how it started?
Sister Kate: The sisterhood was born of the Occupy movement. It was in the fall of 2011, that Congress refused to listen to Michelle Obama speak about the state of the lunches we feed our children and how inferior they are to other countries, and when they subsequently declared pizza a vegetable (to make it seem more nutritious), I declared myself a nun.
My words were, “If pizza is a vegetable, then I am a nun.” My nephew challenged me to put that on a sign and go to the next Occupy event as a nun, which I did—and all the subsequent protests—and became known as Sister Occupy.
I thought that was that, but my forays out to protests around California brought me into conversations with women of all races and ages who encouraged me to find a new age order of nuns—including a few Catholic nuns I met out there on the protest routes. It was a four-year conversation of love that resulted in the birth of the Sisterhood, and it was our research that led us to the Beguines as a historical model.
AC 420: Do you plan to grow the sisterhood?
Sister Kate: Yes, we are always focused on growth. We just had Sister Rosa here from Sweden; we have a pathway to a farm and our first group of people working toward that in Brazil. The Mexico Sisters are actively doing commerce with their all-Spanish store. The pandemic was a big setback and put a debt over our heads we had not had before it happened. We must grow, and we have bet our futures on it.
AC 420: What are your business challenges?
Sister Kate: In 2019, after being faithful and cashless customers (meaning, all our sales came from credit card sales), our bank, Patelco, shut down our accounts mid-year. It turns out, they tried to get the local, state, and federal authorities to investigate us, to no avail, and took matters into their own hands and withdrew banking.
That was the year that approximately 90% of the cannabis businesses went out of business on the west coast for lack of banking. We were bank-less for five months that year. We continued to make sales, but there was no bank to receive the funds into, no mechanism for paying payroll. It was a nightmare and nearly put us out of business.
If it were not for a female VP of a mid-western bank seeing our film (Breaking Habits) and reaching out to us to provide banking, we would have been out of business by that Christmas. Many businesses did fail because of a hostile banking world. We were just getting our feet back on the ground from that when the pandemic hit. So, three consecutive years of losses are hard to swallow for women who consider being good business people as part of sustainability.
Of course, we are doing many things to bounce back. Sister Maria recently studied our customers and determined that we had over 200 this year who spent over $2,000 in our store and quickly rolled out a loyalty program.
We are building our mushroom grow operations so we can begin to sell spore kits. We launched an AI bot in our store to help people figure out which of our medicines are best for what conditions. Our mushroom coffee, developed and launched during the pandemic, is extremely popular already and we are now getting requests for a decaf formula.
AC 420: You make your products by moon cycles. Please explain.
Sister Kate: We believe that there is a special connection that women have with the moon, a common belief in all ancient cultures. We also believe that the connection provides an energy source that—combined with a prayerful and sacred environment—fuels the healing abilities of the medicines we make.
We make the medicines by the cycles of the moon as a meditation in being in touch with our sacred ancestors; we make them that way because they made them that way. We begin a new batch on the new moon, and we complete a batch on the full moon. All products are labeled with a moon cycle sticker that corresponds to the test results listed on our store website.
AC 420: Are you against THC or would you use it in your products if you could ship it to customers nationwide?
Sister Kate: We are not against THC, and once a year (about this time of year) we make a special batch of salves and tinctures for ourselves that include THC. Our mission, however, is to get the plant medicine to the most people around the world. We do not think THC will ever be more than a local business, although we could be wrong. Things might change so much that psychoactive products can travel borders, but I do not see that in my lifetime.
We also know that neurologists and doctors seek for their patients a fuller spectrum and balanced 1-to-1 ratio of CBD to THC. We can make that, for sure, but we cannot sell it anywhere but in dispensaries. If we want to sell in dispensaries, we must have each plant in their track and trace system.
All that makes us just shake our heads and say, “we will keep with the non-psychoactive products until Mother Goddess can show us another way.”
AC 420: What is your opinion of research regarding CBD?
Sister Kate: We are incredibly pleased with the scientific community’s interest in the healing properties of the plant. It is long overdue, but they were not in a position before to study it, legally, and so here we are, learning what we already knew, but having it quantified and confirmed by the scientists.
It is all wonderful and when the Oregon scientists came out in February of just this year saying that the raw compounds of the cannabis plant tend to inhibit infection, we got busy creating a formula that had more raw medicine.
We might have been ahead of science for decades, but now we are the followers. As a result of the new science, we launched a gel cap and oil drops that both have about two-thirds of the raw plant medicine (CBDa and CBGa) and one-third of the cooked compound CBD.
For people with serious health challenges or undergoing dramatic treatments, we believe this combination is key to maintaining and reviving health. For people who have chronic pain, and are only dealing with chronic pain, they will stick with our standard products that are 90% the heated form of CBD.
For chronic pain, they are taken together. One CBD gel cap gives 30 mg of the heated compound CBD, which is most effective for pain. Another CBD Plus gel cap will give another 10 mg of CBD plus 20 mg of CBDa and CBGa, the raw compounds. For chronic pain, illness, or sleeplessness, we know this combination is effective.
AC 420: What are your plans for the farm?
Sister Kate: If we could get the second story on our abbey, we could have guests stay in during the full moon ceremonies. We do not do that very often because we have limited space. We hope that in the next few years, we will be blessed with the funding to build it.
We have already paid for the plans to be drawn up by a French architect. It has a winding staircase and vaulted ceilings with cathedral windows. It might be too fancy for Winton, CA, but it is our dream.
We are currently building out our mushroom grow lab, where we will be inoculating spore kits so people can grow their own mushrooms. We intend to begin with four choices in varieties of mushrooms to grow: two functional mushrooms and two psilocybin strains.
When we inoculate the bag, the customer has four weeks to get it going or it spoils. So, if someone intends to grow their own mushrooms, they should not order until they are ready to work that batch. Each spore kit yields a half ounce to an ounce and a half of mushrooms, depending on the care and environment. It is not legal in most places to have psilocybin mushrooms, but spore kits are legal. This is like how cannabis laws were, back when the plant was illegal, but the seed was legal.
The scientific community, therapists, and doctors across the world will grow their own mushrooms if they must. They are clamoring for access. They know what we learned—that mushrooms are magical, and our understanding is at the infant stage. But we do know they change things.
We all began switching from coffee bean coffee to mushroom coffee during the pandemic and saw amazing results in mood and clarity. We also know that microdosing psilocybin has powerful effects in helping the brain to rewire itself painlessly. Any plant that has healing abilities or the capabilities of lifting people from torment has our attention and our respect.
AC 420: What CBD personal care products do you offer that may benefit hair, skin, and nails?
Sister Kate: We recommend CBD Plus because it has the raw and the cooked cannabis compounds. Science is telling us more and more that the inclusion of raw compounds with the heated compounds results in a wider range of health benefits. To my knowledge, there is no evidence of those results coming from just the CBD or just the THC heated compounds.
AC 420: What are some of your best-selling products?
Sister Kate: Our topical salve is and always has been our best-seller. I did not really understand why until I did an extensive market analysis in 2022 to determine how our products stack up against the competition. It turns out, no one is really offering a salve like ours. I could not find any topical CBD salve that had as many key ingredients for absorption, the high-quality organic beeswax, the essential oils, or the CBD potency.
The analysis made us raise our prices, but we adjusted the price downward on many other products that are not so unique in the marketplace. The analysis made me understand why our salve is so popular and why people who often whine about the price continue to buy it.
When a recent media reporter asked Sister Sophia, “What does the salve do?” she quickly responded, “Oh, what doesn’t it do?” She responded that way because even though we designed it to relieve muscle and joint pain, our customers began from the earliest days, reporting on all the other things it does.
We quickly put “multi-purpose” on the banner on the jars because we realized we knew nothing about this medicine. We learned people put a dab behind each ear in the morning to prevent migraines, that people replaced their sleeping pills by simply rubbing the salve on their temples before sleep.
We have heard, of course, that people found use of stiff joints or hands after one application, and that it has effectively healed skin wounds, burns and cuts, in short order. We had one man report that they used our salve to clear his grand-daughter’s diaper rash at the same time he applied it to his aching knees for relief while they were with the family at the zoo.
People send us before and after images of wounds and cuts, although we did not design it for that. There is much we are still learning from our customers.
AC 420: Are you growing the sisterhood?
Sister Kate: We are growing the sisterhood, but ever so slowly and carefully. The pandemic was a large setback as we lost about a third of our sisterhood. No one died, but what happened is what one would expect when they gather healers. A pandemic came and their families needed them. They scattered to the winds, and we have not totally recovered all of them at this time. Some we will not.
Pre-pandemic, we had two budding enclaves going on away from the mother farm here in Merced, CA. We had one in Willows, CA, a few hours north of us, headed by Sister Sophia and focused on wholesale sales and serving stores. Another in New Zealand under the leadership of Sister Maria.
When the pandemic came, we found it necessary to collapse all three into one and bunk down together in Merced. We are now looking at ways to acquire land in Mexico for our growing sisterhood there.
Sister Rosa has acquired a place in Sweden and Sister Flora has the people and the plans to execute within five years in Brazil. So yes, we are growing, but sometimes we must contract, regroup, and plan for the next stage. That is where we are now.
AC 420: How can one join your fellowship program?
Sister Kate: Anyone who has any intention of meeting us, collaborating with us, visiting us, participating with us in any way, must go through the fellowship handshake. We do not think our ancient mothers would have let anyone wander in, and neither do we.
So we set up a place on Patreon whereby a handshake can occur. It costs $5 (one time) to receive a free download of our customs and beliefs. And after reading that, we request that the party go back into the portal and answer a lengthy questionnaire about themselves.
This ensures that the inquiring party understands who we are and what we are about, and via the questionnaire, gives us a chance to know who they are and what they are all about.
There is no need to continue to pay the $5 every month after the first month, and no data is taken away. Once the questionnaire is complete, the person can request direct contact with the sisters and, depending on how the handshake goes, may potentially be extended a visit.
AC 420: Anything you want to add?
Sister Kate: Just this: we ship worldwide and our website is www.sistersofthevalley.org.
Sheldon Baker is CEO of the Baker Dillon Group LLC and has created numerous nutraceutical brand marketing communications and public relations campaigns for many well-known supplement and food industry companies. For interview consideration or brand marketing consulting, contact him at Contact@The420AreaCode.com.
Arriving in California while the laws were allowing cannabis commerce, she and her brother began a collective, where they delivered cannabis to the sick and dying. While doing this work, Sister Kate began formulating teas and tinctures, gentler ways of ingesting the medicine, which quickly grew to 15% of sales.
Inspired by the reaction to non-smokable forms of the medicine, Sister Kate began exploring non-psychoactive strains of the cannabis plant. She was also determined to create jobs and leadership opportunities for more women like her.
In the fall of 2014, she harvested her first crop of non-psychoactive cannabis and formulated her first line of products. The sales from the products have sustained the Sisterhood for eight years now, and those first products are still the Sisters’ best-selling products.
Area Code 420 (AC 420): Interesting approach to branding your business. Are Sisters of the Valley Catholic nuns?
Sister Kate: I think some of the sisters might argue that the plant branded us, not the other way around. We are not Catholic nuns, but we all have a calling to work with plant-based medicine. That calling is what brings us together. The work keeps us together.
The dictionary definition of a nun is that they live together, work together, pray together, and take vows. Our order qualifies, even though we remain, like our Beguine ancestors, unaffiliated with a particular religion. We are spiritual and scholarly women, and such an affiliation would inhibit our work.
AC 420: Describe the sisterhood and how it started?
Sister Kate: The sisterhood was born of the Occupy movement. It was in the fall of 2011, that Congress refused to listen to Michelle Obama speak about the state of the lunches we feed our children and how inferior they are to other countries, and when they subsequently declared pizza a vegetable (to make it seem more nutritious), I declared myself a nun.
My words were, “If pizza is a vegetable, then I am a nun.” My nephew challenged me to put that on a sign and go to the next Occupy event as a nun, which I did—and all the subsequent protests—and became known as Sister Occupy.
I thought that was that, but my forays out to protests around California brought me into conversations with women of all races and ages who encouraged me to find a new age order of nuns—including a few Catholic nuns I met out there on the protest routes. It was a four-year conversation of love that resulted in the birth of the Sisterhood, and it was our research that led us to the Beguines as a historical model.
AC 420: Do you plan to grow the sisterhood?
Sister Kate: Yes, we are always focused on growth. We just had Sister Rosa here from Sweden; we have a pathway to a farm and our first group of people working toward that in Brazil. The Mexico Sisters are actively doing commerce with their all-Spanish store. The pandemic was a big setback and put a debt over our heads we had not had before it happened. We must grow, and we have bet our futures on it.
AC 420: What are your business challenges?
Sister Kate: In 2019, after being faithful and cashless customers (meaning, all our sales came from credit card sales), our bank, Patelco, shut down our accounts mid-year. It turns out, they tried to get the local, state, and federal authorities to investigate us, to no avail, and took matters into their own hands and withdrew banking.
That was the year that approximately 90% of the cannabis businesses went out of business on the west coast for lack of banking. We were bank-less for five months that year. We continued to make sales, but there was no bank to receive the funds into, no mechanism for paying payroll. It was a nightmare and nearly put us out of business.
If it were not for a female VP of a mid-western bank seeing our film (Breaking Habits) and reaching out to us to provide banking, we would have been out of business by that Christmas. Many businesses did fail because of a hostile banking world. We were just getting our feet back on the ground from that when the pandemic hit. So, three consecutive years of losses are hard to swallow for women who consider being good business people as part of sustainability.
Of course, we are doing many things to bounce back. Sister Maria recently studied our customers and determined that we had over 200 this year who spent over $2,000 in our store and quickly rolled out a loyalty program.
We are building our mushroom grow operations so we can begin to sell spore kits. We launched an AI bot in our store to help people figure out which of our medicines are best for what conditions. Our mushroom coffee, developed and launched during the pandemic, is extremely popular already and we are now getting requests for a decaf formula.
AC 420: You make your products by moon cycles. Please explain.
Sister Kate: We believe that there is a special connection that women have with the moon, a common belief in all ancient cultures. We also believe that the connection provides an energy source that—combined with a prayerful and sacred environment—fuels the healing abilities of the medicines we make.
We make the medicines by the cycles of the moon as a meditation in being in touch with our sacred ancestors; we make them that way because they made them that way. We begin a new batch on the new moon, and we complete a batch on the full moon. All products are labeled with a moon cycle sticker that corresponds to the test results listed on our store website.
AC 420: Are you against THC or would you use it in your products if you could ship it to customers nationwide?
Sister Kate: We are not against THC, and once a year (about this time of year) we make a special batch of salves and tinctures for ourselves that include THC. Our mission, however, is to get the plant medicine to the most people around the world. We do not think THC will ever be more than a local business, although we could be wrong. Things might change so much that psychoactive products can travel borders, but I do not see that in my lifetime.
We also know that neurologists and doctors seek for their patients a fuller spectrum and balanced 1-to-1 ratio of CBD to THC. We can make that, for sure, but we cannot sell it anywhere but in dispensaries. If we want to sell in dispensaries, we must have each plant in their track and trace system.
All that makes us just shake our heads and say, “we will keep with the non-psychoactive products until Mother Goddess can show us another way.”
AC 420: What is your opinion of research regarding CBD?
Sister Kate: We are incredibly pleased with the scientific community’s interest in the healing properties of the plant. It is long overdue, but they were not in a position before to study it, legally, and so here we are, learning what we already knew, but having it quantified and confirmed by the scientists.
It is all wonderful and when the Oregon scientists came out in February of just this year saying that the raw compounds of the cannabis plant tend to inhibit infection, we got busy creating a formula that had more raw medicine.
We might have been ahead of science for decades, but now we are the followers. As a result of the new science, we launched a gel cap and oil drops that both have about two-thirds of the raw plant medicine (CBDa and CBGa) and one-third of the cooked compound CBD.
For people with serious health challenges or undergoing dramatic treatments, we believe this combination is key to maintaining and reviving health. For people who have chronic pain, and are only dealing with chronic pain, they will stick with our standard products that are 90% the heated form of CBD.
For chronic pain, they are taken together. One CBD gel cap gives 30 mg of the heated compound CBD, which is most effective for pain. Another CBD Plus gel cap will give another 10 mg of CBD plus 20 mg of CBDa and CBGa, the raw compounds. For chronic pain, illness, or sleeplessness, we know this combination is effective.
AC 420: What are your plans for the farm?
Sister Kate: If we could get the second story on our abbey, we could have guests stay in during the full moon ceremonies. We do not do that very often because we have limited space. We hope that in the next few years, we will be blessed with the funding to build it.
We have already paid for the plans to be drawn up by a French architect. It has a winding staircase and vaulted ceilings with cathedral windows. It might be too fancy for Winton, CA, but it is our dream.
We are currently building out our mushroom grow lab, where we will be inoculating spore kits so people can grow their own mushrooms. We intend to begin with four choices in varieties of mushrooms to grow: two functional mushrooms and two psilocybin strains.
When we inoculate the bag, the customer has four weeks to get it going or it spoils. So, if someone intends to grow their own mushrooms, they should not order until they are ready to work that batch. Each spore kit yields a half ounce to an ounce and a half of mushrooms, depending on the care and environment. It is not legal in most places to have psilocybin mushrooms, but spore kits are legal. This is like how cannabis laws were, back when the plant was illegal, but the seed was legal.
The scientific community, therapists, and doctors across the world will grow their own mushrooms if they must. They are clamoring for access. They know what we learned—that mushrooms are magical, and our understanding is at the infant stage. But we do know they change things.
We all began switching from coffee bean coffee to mushroom coffee during the pandemic and saw amazing results in mood and clarity. We also know that microdosing psilocybin has powerful effects in helping the brain to rewire itself painlessly. Any plant that has healing abilities or the capabilities of lifting people from torment has our attention and our respect.
AC 420: What CBD personal care products do you offer that may benefit hair, skin, and nails?
Sister Kate: We recommend CBD Plus because it has the raw and the cooked cannabis compounds. Science is telling us more and more that the inclusion of raw compounds with the heated compounds results in a wider range of health benefits. To my knowledge, there is no evidence of those results coming from just the CBD or just the THC heated compounds.
AC 420: What are some of your best-selling products?
Sister Kate: Our topical salve is and always has been our best-seller. I did not really understand why until I did an extensive market analysis in 2022 to determine how our products stack up against the competition. It turns out, no one is really offering a salve like ours. I could not find any topical CBD salve that had as many key ingredients for absorption, the high-quality organic beeswax, the essential oils, or the CBD potency.
The analysis made us raise our prices, but we adjusted the price downward on many other products that are not so unique in the marketplace. The analysis made me understand why our salve is so popular and why people who often whine about the price continue to buy it.
When a recent media reporter asked Sister Sophia, “What does the salve do?” she quickly responded, “Oh, what doesn’t it do?” She responded that way because even though we designed it to relieve muscle and joint pain, our customers began from the earliest days, reporting on all the other things it does.
We quickly put “multi-purpose” on the banner on the jars because we realized we knew nothing about this medicine. We learned people put a dab behind each ear in the morning to prevent migraines, that people replaced their sleeping pills by simply rubbing the salve on their temples before sleep.
We have heard, of course, that people found use of stiff joints or hands after one application, and that it has effectively healed skin wounds, burns and cuts, in short order. We had one man report that they used our salve to clear his grand-daughter’s diaper rash at the same time he applied it to his aching knees for relief while they were with the family at the zoo.
People send us before and after images of wounds and cuts, although we did not design it for that. There is much we are still learning from our customers.
AC 420: Are you growing the sisterhood?
Sister Kate: We are growing the sisterhood, but ever so slowly and carefully. The pandemic was a large setback as we lost about a third of our sisterhood. No one died, but what happened is what one would expect when they gather healers. A pandemic came and their families needed them. They scattered to the winds, and we have not totally recovered all of them at this time. Some we will not.
Pre-pandemic, we had two budding enclaves going on away from the mother farm here in Merced, CA. We had one in Willows, CA, a few hours north of us, headed by Sister Sophia and focused on wholesale sales and serving stores. Another in New Zealand under the leadership of Sister Maria.
When the pandemic came, we found it necessary to collapse all three into one and bunk down together in Merced. We are now looking at ways to acquire land in Mexico for our growing sisterhood there.
Sister Rosa has acquired a place in Sweden and Sister Flora has the people and the plans to execute within five years in Brazil. So yes, we are growing, but sometimes we must contract, regroup, and plan for the next stage. That is where we are now.
AC 420: How can one join your fellowship program?
Sister Kate: Anyone who has any intention of meeting us, collaborating with us, visiting us, participating with us in any way, must go through the fellowship handshake. We do not think our ancient mothers would have let anyone wander in, and neither do we.
So we set up a place on Patreon whereby a handshake can occur. It costs $5 (one time) to receive a free download of our customs and beliefs. And after reading that, we request that the party go back into the portal and answer a lengthy questionnaire about themselves.
This ensures that the inquiring party understands who we are and what we are about, and via the questionnaire, gives us a chance to know who they are and what they are all about.
There is no need to continue to pay the $5 every month after the first month, and no data is taken away. Once the questionnaire is complete, the person can request direct contact with the sisters and, depending on how the handshake goes, may potentially be extended a visit.
AC 420: Anything you want to add?
Sister Kate: Just this: we ship worldwide and our website is www.sistersofthevalley.org.
Sheldon Baker is CEO of the Baker Dillon Group LLC and has created numerous nutraceutical brand marketing communications and public relations campaigns for many well-known supplement and food industry companies. For interview consideration or brand marketing consulting, contact him at Contact@The420AreaCode.com.
