July 30th, 2025 12:00 PM PST
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We invite you to join us for an inspiring conversation at the intersection of psychedelics, Black liberation, and collective transformation. This Community Forum will explore how entheogens can support movements for racial justice, community healing, and radical imagination. Grounded in both lived experience and historical insight, our speakers will examine how psychedelics might move beyond personal wellness to become tools of collective empowerment and spiritual revolution. Together, we’ll explore urgent questions such as: How can the “Psychedelic Renaissance” serve the needs of Black and BIPOC communities? What obstacles stand in the way of mass participation and healing? Can entheogenic practices help us reclaim power beyond the political realm, and even beyond the self? What models from history can guide us today? And what does liberation actually look like, within and without? Speakers include Dr. Nicholas Powers, author of Black Psychedelic Revolution and a longtime commentator on race, politics, and psychoanalysis; Sia Henry, lawyer, abolitionist, and senior policy associate at MAPS working at the intersection of criminal justice reform and psychedelic equity; and Soi Kene Witan, Shipibo-trained plant medicine practitioner and educator, exploring Black identity and healing through Indigenous Amazonian traditions.
Dr. Nicholas Powers is an Associate Professor, novelist, poet and journalist. His recent book Black Psychedelic Revolution was published by Upset Press in 2025. He has written for Double-Blind, Truth-Out, the Village Voice, and Lucid News. He has given talks at Horizons, Naropa University Center for Psychedelic Studies, Big Psyche and Burning Man. His areas of focus are literature, political economy, psychoanalysis and social movements. He has reported from the NYC during 9/11, New Orleans after Hurrican Katrina, the Darfur Genocide and Black Lives Matters.
Sia Henry is deeply committed to liberation and racial justice and has spent over a decade in the criminal legal system reform and abolition spaces. Currently a senior policy associate at MAPS, Sia previously supported communities in establishing pre-charge restorative justice diversion programs. She also spent years fighting to improve conditions for incarcerated people with physical and developmental disabilities and mental health issues and those most at risk of sexualized violence. Sia also founded the Hood Exchange, which aims to introduce formerly incarcerated, Black communities to travel throughout the African diaspora. Sia graduated from Harvard Law School and Duke University.
Soi Kene Witan is a Shipibo Plant Medicine Practitioner, author, speaker, and leads Mens Work. He has been studying Shipibo Plant Medicine, an Indigenous healing technology from the Peruvian Amazon, renowned for profound and often life-changing transformations since 2012, and is a student of the highly respected maestro Ricardo Amaringo, He considers it to be a great honor to be one of a very small number of westerners trained in this tradition. To his knowledge, he is the only black person with such training. He runs traditional Shipibo-style retreats in the US and internationally. He has always had unique perspectives on race. The child of a black Jamaican man, and a white American woman, he was raised in the US by his mother in an essentially all-white environment. As he did not have substantive interactions with black people until his adolescence, he has always had an outsider/insider perspective on both white and black culture. Prior to working with people, he worked for many years as a director and cinematographer. He studied film at NYU.
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