The Sheri Eckert Foundation
The mission of SEF, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, is to increase equitable access in the emerging state-regulated psychedelic healthcare movement.
For the latest update from our Executive Director on our work to date and we’re we’re going, head here.
Our impact
184 people served, 4 research projects, 2 conferences
Through our grants and real-world research projects, the Sheri Eckert Foundation (SEF) funded legal psilocybin therapy for over 100 people, with more on the way, and awarded and oversaw 76 training scholarships.
In co-creating Horizons Northwest, the largest psychedelic learning and community event on the West Coast, we’ve brought together thousands of people from around the country and beyond in support of creating a reverent and accessible psychdellic culture.
Now with four SEF-sponsored research projects underway and more coming online, and hundreds of additional people that will be able to access legal psychedelic therapy through our needs-based access funds, we plan to grow alongside the state-regulated psychedelic healthcare model and movement that our namesake created.
$1,000,000+ in financial assistance
In 2025 and 2024, SEF funded and helped organize the nation’s first collection of real-world research projects in Oregon’s legal and publicly available psychedelic therapy model.
In the same period, we launched the Psilocybin Therapy Access Fund where we’ve received 481 applications and issued or earmarked $674,000 in needs-based psychedelic therapy grants to over 100 people, with more on the way.
Between 2021 and 2023, SEF created our Fellowship Program where we issued 76 needs-based scholarships — totaling $300,000 in awards — to a diverse range of students pursuing training and licensure in psilocybin facilitation. This helped seed Oregon’s newly adopted psychedelic healthcare model with a diverse cohort of Facilitators. SEF Fellows attended and have now graduated from nearly every Oregon-licensed facilitator training school in the country.
2030: our goal for insurance reimbursements
We’re simultaneously creating access for hundreds of people that otherwise couldn’t have received psychedelic therapy while creating the datasets necessary to advance the advent of psychedelic healthcare coverage. This approach takes the field of therapeutic psychedelic services and therapy on a path familiar to other fields now covered, like acupuncture and naturopathy.
Once coverage is achieved — which we feel is inevitable but will take focused effort – we will see the state regulated psychedelic healthcare model take off at an even more impactful scale. We believe this is the pathway to greater equitable access. And we believe it could arrive by 2030.
Learn more about our work as a research incubator, and our current research projects, by reading this update and signing up for our newsletter.
Nate Howard, Executive Director of the Sheri Eckert Foundation, discusses the goals of the foundation's forthcoming Access Funds and research projects at the Horizons Northwest conference in December 2023 at the Portland Art Museum, sitting alongside Rebecca Martinez and Emma Knighton
Phase 2 is underway: increasing access now while paving the way for insurance coverage.
With a 2024/2025 fundraising objective of one million dollars, SEF’s immediate goal is to create a statewide “sliding scale” for psilocybin services for various communities while supporting the development and execution of real-world research.
Our three funds — Psilocybin Access Fund, Community Leaders Resilience Fund, Inward Dive Fund — cover psilocybin facilitation costs for those in need of deep healing and who experience financial hardship and/or come from underserved communities. We believe getting money directly to folks that want this medicine, but normally wouldn’t be able to access it, is the best solution now for creating more access and potential for healing.
While respecting and valuing underground pathways and the FDA pathway, we are committed to this new state-regulated framework and believe that psychedelic services and therapy rendered in this model can be more widespread, financially accessible, and without the legal risk.
And we’re under no illusion that philanthropy will last forever — we see these access funds, and the first-of-their-kind research projects they have helped catalyze, as an essential intermediary step as we work towards the arrival of insurance coverage for psilocybin therapy. To learn more about our research incubator — the Psilocybin Therapy Insurance Initiative — which is designed to help accelerate insurance coverage for psychedelic medicine in legal state-regulated models, head here.
The Sheri Eckert Foundation was established in 2021 to honor Sheri’s legacy and fulfill a clearly stated wish.
Measure 109 co-creator Sheri Eckert, who passed away in December of 2020, spoke frequently of generating support for “equitable access to psychedelic education and services.” In her words, she wanted to create an institution that, “guided by on-the-ground community leaders, would allocate resources to support facilitator training, community education, and service delivery for often underserved populations.”
David Bronner, Tom Eckert, and Nate Howard—the Founding Board Members of the Sheri Eckert Foundation and co-creators of Horizons Northwest—share reflections, goals, and aspirations, alongside leaders in the psychedelic medicine movement, at the second Horizons Northwest conference at the Portland Art Museum
Support equitable access to psilocybin services for those with financial need
SEF is honored to have co-created the second annual Horizons Northwest in Portland!
Horizons Northwest, the largest psychedelic learning and community event in the Pacific Northwest, is produced by Horizons PBC in partnership with SEF.
A share of the proceeds from Horizons Northwest is given to the Sheri Eckert Foundation to support its scholarship program. It’s a beautiful arrangement: the more people that attend Horizons Northwest, the more funds support the psychedelic medicine community in the form of needs-based scholarships.
The conference features three days exploring Oregon’s Psilocybin Services Program while advancing national and global dialogues around psychedelics.
“If you take the time to explore yourself, to listen to your spirit, to walk among the many less frequented paths within your mind, I am sure you will be amazed at the mesmerizing beauty you will find.”
— Sheri Eckert
Sheri will be remembered by the psychedelic community for championing the unique spirit residing in each of us
and for having helped deliver the nation’s first above-ground psychedelic therapy framework, a statewide program indelibly infused with her characteristic perseverance, integrity, competence, and, above all, her loving, inclusive embrace.
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