Announcing Trellis (and other exciting announcements)

New name, status, support, mission, and a rave!

We have some exciting updates to share with the BPS community.

New Blog Name ✍️

First things first, you are probably noticing that you are reading this on the newly titled Brooklyn Psychedelic Society blog. We originally named this blog our slogan, “Community is the Medicine”, but we decided it would be better for visibility purposes if we just called it the Brooklyn Psychedelic Society Blog and Podcast. So you can consider this the official re-launch of the BPS Blog and Podcast! I’d like to give an honorary shout-out to the guest we had under the Community is the Medicine moniker, David Bronner (an excellent, very open conversation they and I had that you can watch/listen to here that I highly encourage you to check out). Onto exciting updates!

Non-profit Status Acquired ✊

Our first big announcement: We have been granted 501(c)3 status by the IRS! We are now officially a federally recognized nonprofit. I want to thank MAPS for being our fiscal sponsor these past 3 years as we grew from a meetup group to a fully-fledged nonprofit. Whenever you make a donation to BPS (which you can do here!), you can fully deduct the amount from your taxes and BPS will take 100% of it. I would also like to thank the IRS (for real) for recognizing the importance of community-based practices and support for (legal!) psychedelic journeying. This is a really big milestone for us. I want to thank our Operations Coordinator Katarina Bartel for making this happen!

Dr. Bronner’s Support 🧼

I am delighted to share that Dr. Bronner’s soap company has committed $150k to Brooklyn Psychedelic Society this year 🎉I am grateful to Dr. Bronner’s for this generous contribution. This gift will enable us to operate consistently for the entirety of 2024. Dr. Bronner’s committed this grant based on our new mission: to pilot an open-source framework for community-based healing and transformation. Dr. Bronner’s understands the importance of developing safe, affordable, transformational self-regulating settings for psychedelic experience. Creating a self-regulating community-based ecosystem for the psychedelic field is extremely important, and I’m honored that BPS is being recognized as a leader in that field. thank you Dr. Bronner’s!

Trellis: an open-source framework for community-based healing and transformation 🪴

New blog name, 501(c)3 status, our biggest support yet from Dr. Bronner’s…What does this all revolve around? It stems from our vision and mission that has been incubating at BPS for the past 9 years: establishing community-based healing as an institution in our culture though self-regulating community healing centers.

Right now, as psychedelics become more and more mainstream, people only have really two options for taking them: (1) either spend a lot of money at a clinic/retreat, or a regulated experience or (2) risk one’s safety by going underground (which can still be quite expensive!).

There’s a third way to do psychedelics that humans have been doing for thousands of years: community-based healing and transformation. But as a heavily individualistic culture, we as Americans don’t really have a cultural container for doing community-based healing and transformation. But so far, community-based healing has mainly existed as an inspiring idea. The word community is also very popular these days, especially because so many of us feel alone at times. Our slogan after all is Community is the Medicine! But after 9 years of community-organizing in the psychedelic space, we began to ask the question: what does community-based healing actually look like in practice? And we began to realize that we don’t really have a playbook for how to do community-based healing and transformation…Until now!

BPS’s new mission is to develop an open-source framework for community-based healing and transformation called Trellis (pic below!). This framework will help community organizers, facilitators, community stewards, and community members all work together to provide an environment for psychedelic journeying that is safe, affordable, and transformational. Our hope is that Trellis will serve as a framework that gives rise to community-based healing and transformation (CBHT) as a cultural process. To use an analogy, we want Trellis to do for CBHT what the 12-steps do for AA: serve as a structure in which transformation can happen in a community-based setting.

By settings safety and efficacy standards for what CBHT looks like, Trellis will facilitate the creation of a community-based sector in the burgeoning ecosystem; a sector that will not only prioritize equity and transformation but also be effective in delivering care that helps people.

We are really excited for our new focus at BPS and in the coming months we will be launcing Trellis workshops where you can discern, prep, journey (legally!), integrate and get peer support all in service of community-based growth and transformation. We will be doing our first Trellis workshop in late May/early June, so keep your eyes peeled! And last but not least…

After-Rave 🪭

We just announced our Horizons Saturday afterparty for May 11th: After-Rave.

Raving is probably one of the best known examples of community-based healing and transformation already in practice. When we were dreaming up the Horizons afterparty, we couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate (and envision) a community-based psychedelic future than by throwing a rave. We’re hosting two amazing speakers on the practice of raving (Michelle Lhooq (Rave New World) and McKenzie Wark (Raving)) before we get down and rave Brooklyn-style with some prime underground selectors from the scene here. I’m looking forward to raving with you all come May 11th! BPS members get a discount applied to their tickets.

Stay tuned

Subscribe for more exciting updates, podcast interviews, and community-based healing and transformation theory (and practice) here on the BPS Blog and Podcast. See you at the rave!