The goods from District of C. (Photo by Rachel Kurzius)

If you’re looking for a quick art delivery, there’s a new service in town that’ll bring a fresh print to your door. They’ll even throw in some weed as a gift. But the founders aren’t calling it a pot delivery service. Instead, they say, it is a way to create employment opportunities for members of the District’s Deaf community.

Meet District of C, a group of four Deaf D.C. residents that together resemble a Captain Planet-like crew of start-up specialties. Among them, there’s an accountant, a marketing specialist, a website designer, and a “logistics guy” who knows his way around video equipment. “The one thing we really have in common is being Deaf,” they say over a joint email.

The founders, who met in college, say the whole idea is to help provide jobs for Deaf people in D.C. The District is home to about 4,400 adults with some type of hearing disability, among whom there’s a much higher unemployment rate than the city as a whole. As of 2014, 40 percent of working-age people who are hard of hearing had full-time employment in D.C., according to statistics from the American Community Survey. “Many employers are reluctant to hire Deaf people, due to communication barriers,” the founders say.

If you go to the District of C website and denote you’re 21, you’ll have options for a number of pieces of artwork by Deaf artists Angus English and Ashley Hannan. For $55, one of the prints of wildlife or people toking can be yours, often in a matter of hours (there’s a 48-hour guarantee). Plus, there’s that little 3.5 gram gift they’re offering alongside the purchase …

The startup’s founders say that they’re Initiative 71-compliant. Under the weed legalization law implemented in February 2015, you can’t sell cannabis, but you can possess, purchase, grow, and gift it. It’s the gifting that presents an opportunity for budding entrepreneurs.

Much like HighSpeed, a juice delivery startup, District of C operates in the strange limbo of gifting. Unlike HighSpeed or Kush Gods, which popularized the “donation-based” system, District of C has a more streamlined plan. You pay $55 for the art, and the weed is like a cherry on top. No donations necessary.

Or as the founders put it, “We do not sell cannabis. We sell artwork, and provide cannabis as gifts.” The weed comes from “D.C. growers who share it with us.”

Artists Angus English and Ashley Hannan are friends of the founders. “They’re Deaf too, and we’ve known them for a long time,” they say. “We have always noticed that the Deaf community has an outsized amount of visual artistic talent. When you think about it, we can’t hear, so often our other senses improve.” They say more artists’ work will be for sale soon. English and Hannah “get a substantial cut” of the profits, according to District of C, as do the delivery drivers.

The founders say that they’ve been hammering away at business plans, website development, and other details for more than a year. The service is still in beta mode as they work out the kinks. “The genesis of this has been forming for a long time, but we finally felt that this was the time and the place to make it happen,” they say.

The founders describe the response to the service so far as “fabulous. All of our customers have been very excited and supportive.” They declined to release customer numbers.

I tried District of C last week. I used my credit card to purchase the Angus English print “Skeleton,” which features a skeleton smoking a bong, and entered my delivery address. Less than an hour later, I got a follow-up text asking about convenient delivery times and my options for my gift of weed: Monster Cookies, Gelato, Candy Land, Ghost OG, and Blackjack.

I’m no strain connoisseur, but I checked out the offerings on Leafly before opting for Gelato, an indica-sativa hybrid with 4.8 stars on the weed review site and promises “heavy-handed euphoria.”

Over text, I learned that my driver would arrive around 3:15 p.m. Sure enough, I got a text at 3:17—”Your driver is here.” I ran outside to meet him and he handed me a brown paper bag with my artwork and a canister filled with bud. Realizing we couldn’t engage in small talk, because he was Deaf and I don’t know American Sign Language, we smiled instead.

When I got back to my office, I hung up the print and examined the gift. It stunk up the whole room (note: unless you work in an office like mine, I don’t recommend getting your delivery during work hours). I tried it later and yep, “heavy-handed euphoria” sounds about right.