2023 Oakland Psychedelic Conference Travel Grant Recipients
Ana Sofia Cornelius
BIPOC Psychedelic
Sofi is originally from Venezuela. She moved to Colorado after living 15 years on the Oneida reservation in Wisconsin. She comes from a family of community organizers and has been in community organizing for her entire life. She is one of the community members who created the alternative to policing program in Denver called STAR (Supported Team Assisted Response). She currently serves on the STAR Community Advisory Board for the city of Denver. Sofi worked to ensure that they built a community coalition to provide culturally responsive, linguistically specific and geographically appropriate wrap around services that are personalized to each person's needs. Their community partners are Servicios de La Raza (Latinx/Indigenous), Muslim Family services (Muslim, Immigrants, Refugees), DASHR (Unhoused), GRASP (Gang Rescue and Support), Struggle of Love (BIPOC youth and adults), and Face It ( English speaking POC). Future plans with BIPOC Psychedelic are for healing and educational work into our black, brown, and indigenous psychedelic community in Denver. BIPOC Psychedelic has plans to create community dialogue paired with breath work, somatic exercises, ceremony and group processing to move beyond the traumas they have endured to build community networks of care in the psychedelic space. If we are to come together and work together then it is imperative that this work be done. Sofi is intrinsically committed to advancing diversity, equity and inclusion.
Anela Garcia Bird
Anela was born and raised on Maui, Hawaii. Her indigenous community is suffering from mental health issues and her business is geared towards helping them with psychedelic assisted therapy and integration. She is an acupuncturist and utilizes chinese medicine, hawaiian medicine, and mexican folk medicine practices. She has been learning from her Hawaiian medicine teachers and other indigenous teachers. Anela turned to shamanic practices and modern spirituality to work through personal trauma and worked with a few plant teachers intentionally. She would not be who she is today without the guidance of all her teachers. She is also a loving, of course still learning and growing, mother to a 5 year old.
Bree Foster
Columbia University
Bree has been accepted into Columbia University’s graduate program in Clinical Psychology with a position in the Spirituality, Mind, Body Institute with Dr. Lisa Miller. Upon moving to New York City for graduate school this fall she plans to either volunteer or work with non-profit psychedelic-assisted therapy clinics such as Nushama, a financially inclusive ketamine clinic, or Nautilus Sanctuary, a 501(c)(3) non-profit psychedelic research and training center. These organizations are forging massive reach to diverse populations all throughout New York City and neighboring communities through accessibility scholarships and financial plans. Bree aims to explore member and client advocacy positions through these centers. Additionally, she is grateful to have been welcomed as a member into Columbia University’s Interdisciplinary Psychedelic Society. This campus organization hosts a plethora of educational events which often include informational access to research, books, leadership talks, and businesses written and led by Black and other underrepresented voices. Through active participation she looks forward to continuing to learn how to best diversify and expand her future clinical practice to help advance linguistic, racial, sexual orientation, financial, gender, and social equity close to home and the world at large.
Hira Mubeen
Bastyr University
Hira is currently pursuing a naturopathic medical degree at Bastyr University. They are interested in psychedelic science and bringing back the medicine to their people and other people of colour. Their focus in their doctorate program is traditional and cultural medicine, and psychedelic plant medicine is a huge part of that. Hira is looking forward to attending the Oakland Psychedelic Conference to be able to network, and access more resources to accomplish the goal of providing entheogenic medicine to people who look like them.
Jade Mycelia
Big Psych
Jade is the founder of Big Psych, an activist and education organization that centers everyday people in the plant medicine community. By integrating traditional, scientific, spiritual, environmental, and communal explorations of plant medicine, they can evolve with cohesion and empathy. Collective progress is anchored by the many ways of knowing. They advocate for sustainable healing, open conversation, and creative exploration. They support the everyday person in their ability to experience, integrate, and contribute. They host psychedelic community events and conferences, facilitate accessible mushroom cultivation workshops, and have been part of decriminalizing psychedelics in Minneapolis.
Linda Rislin
Linda lives in Buffalo, NY and engages in harm reduction in her community. Before she knew what harm reduction and psychedelic therapy was, she was informing her friends and family about best practices when using psychedelics. Linda and her husband had transformative experiences in the mid-2010s. While it was confusing to friends and family at first, as the clinical trials became more widespread in the media, her community began to ask questions about her experience. In doing this, they were able to feel more grounded and calmer in their interest in having their own psychedelic experience. Linda’s husband had gone deeper into a study about psychedelics, therapy, integration, and harm reduction. Linda learned that she was offering harm reduction to her community of Black Americans, and first-generation Haitian and Panamanian immigrants.
Maya Seale
The University of Texas at Dallas
Maya is currently a research assistant at the Wig Neuroimaging Lab at UT Dallas studying the influence a person’s life, socioeconomic status, & environment has on brain network predictors of cognitive decline. Maya’s research interests revolve around interaction design, AI, network neuroscience, gender expansive psychometrics, mental health, minority stress, community psychology, and critical neuroscience. She recently began an internship with the SNaP lab, working on the first clinical trial focusing on treating PTSD in the transgender umbrella and exploring how various dimensions of the gender expansive mosaic might affect the outcome of MDMA assisted group therapy for minority stress. Maya is passionate about harm reduction and direct action, having dipped her toes in drug policy and civil disobedience with Students for Sensible Drug Policy. Maya is also a peer volunteer with the Fireside Project, providing support during psychedelic experiences.
Melanie Rose Rodgers
Influential X
Melanie is a Filipina community organizer, advocate for drug reform and criminal justice reform and an activist who has changed laws in Denver, Washington, DC, and Colorado. Her parents immigrated from the Philippines and she is the first one in my family to be born in America. Melanie was born and raised in Miami, FL and has been living in Denver, CO for the last fifteen years. Melanie started Influential X, a community organization rooted in education, advocacy and social responsibility. Since 2016, she has hosted and supported dozens of unique local events bringing diverse communities together for fundraising events, educational events, conferences, community events for cannabis patients and for the psychedelic community, and events that give back to various communities in need: the homeless, natural disaster relief and other marginalized communities. She is also the co-founder of a local nonprofit, Expunge Colorado. Since 2018, Expunge Colorado has served the justice-impacted community with our annual record sealing event assisting and serving over 500 people to date with pro bono record sealing services. Our critical work exists to address racial inequities in the criminal justice system, elevate voices of the impacted, and to accelerate systematic change by supporting measures that automate record-sealing at the community level and advocating at the state level.
Rachel Rumstein
Columbia University
Rachel is pursuing a degree in Cognitive Science specializing in the intersection between psychedelics in Cognitive Science. She recently presented a research proposal to stimulate the effects of N,N-Dimethyltryptamine in artificial neural networks with the intention of simulating biological neural models for harm reduction purposes such as facilitator training and dose-response modeling, and to infer more about the biological basis of the psychedelic experience in general. I also hope to simulate non-neurotypical brains so that we might learn how to use psychedelics to more efficiently ease non-desired symptoms. Rachel also hosts a weekly podcast that is soon to enter its second season which focuses on psychedelic science communication. On it, she interviews experts in psychedelic research, clinical psychology, and spiritual leadership in hopes to leverage education as an effective tool in harm reduction and drug advocacy. As an aspiring researcher, she hopes to keep diversity, equality, and inclusion at the forefront of her mission - being sure to lay a foundation of diverse clinical professionals to ensure a diversity of perspectives in her studies, and specifically uplifting the voices of other first-generation students who hope to leave their rightful mark in psychedelic research and academia in general.
Rhys Hall
NYC Psychedelic Society
Rhys has been a co-facilitator with the NYC Psychedelic Society since 2019. They offer free and sliding scale integration circles monthly on Zoom for POC. They give harm reduction techniques to people who are new to psychedelics, share skills with people who are more experienced, and listen to and hold space for people who want to share their experiences and questions. As far as psychedelic therapy, Rhys had held space for many people in his local community on their first journeys, and is learning integration techniques through a course called the Condor Approach. Both are helping him put more clear and concise words to describe what he had been doing internally, and allowing him to translate that internal work in order to explain to people in his community how to do it themselves. Its also helping his ability to listen to people in his community, regardless of their age, to hear what kind of harm reduction or integration information they might need, instead of letting worry and fear take over.