While I was on a retreat to celebrate my five-year cancerversary, I met a young woman who, like me, had been diagnosed with breast cancer in her thirties. But in her case, the cancer had come back. She had metastatic breast cancer and was still so young. Over time, she became one of my closest friends.

We found ourselves talking a lot about uncertainty, the future, and death—the kinds of conversations you fall into quickly with someone who truly gets it. I shared my own experience with psilocybin and how much it had helped me. And during one of our conversations, I realized something important: there are so many people who are curious about this kind of healing work, but who don’t have a safe or legal way to access it.

It felt deeply important to me that anyone interested in exploring this should have a safe, supportive path to do so.

At the time, it was late 2023, and Oregon had just passed a law making state-regulated access to psilocybin legal—though it’s still schedule 1 at the federal level. Suddenly, it didn’t feel quite so frightening to talk about this as a real possibility. I recommend against people going abroad or underground for these experiences, especially those dealing with serious medical conditions. But in places like Oregon—and now Colorado—there’s access to excellent medical care, and potentially, a state-legal path to psilocybin therapy.

That’s what sparked the idea for the Survivorship Collective. I founded it alongside other cancer survivors because we recognized a real need within our own community. It’s an organization created by the community it serves, and I think that’s incredibly important.

We advocate fiercely for our community’s needs in this space. We believe in taking care of our own. We focus on education and harm reduction because people deserve safe, informed choices. And we believe that our voices—those of us who’ve faced mortality up close—need to cut through both the “woo-woo” and the corporate interests that are increasingly crowding into this field.

Because ultimately, this work has to be about people—and about sacred things: about death, and about finding meaning in suffering and grief. That’s what we’re all about at the Survivorship Collective.

Anne Hamilton - Founder