Healing Hearts, Changing Minds awards $566,260 to seven projects to advance psychedelic-assisted end-of-life care

Healing Hearts, Changing Minds

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Derry, NH, January 27, 2026 — Healing Hearts, Changing Minds (HHCM) today announced the seven awardees of Walking Each Other Home: A Fund to Promote Psychedelic Compassion for End-of-Life Care, a $566,260 philanthropic initiative supporting innovation, compassion, and dignity for people at life’s end.

Anxiety when facing serious, life-threatening illnesses is a significant issue for society. In fact, it is often so painful that it prevents patients from living fully. Research has shown that psychedelic therapy can be extremely effective in reducing anxiety and helping people to live fully and meaningfully. HHCM recognized that more research is needed to identify the best ways to deliver the therapy to people in need.

Following an extensive listening tour with over two dozen leaders across palliative care, hospice medicine, spiritual care, psychedelic research, and end-of-life advocacy, HHCM launched this funding round in July 2025 to catalyze bold, field-defining work. The response was extraordinary: 59 proposals requesting a total of $4.8 million. 

The proposals were reviewed by six independent subject matter expert reviewers in psychedelic end-of-life care. using a scoring rubric that assesses the criteria in the RFP and aligns HHCM’s values of compassion, integrity, and community empowerment. HHCM selected seven outstanding grantees whose work exemplifies the fund’s mission and values. This represents an acceptance rate of 12% in a competitive group of submissions, underscoring both the strength of the submissions and the growing capacity in the field of psychedelic end-of-life care.

2026 ‘Walking Each Other Home’ Grantees

The following seven projects received grants. More information about each of them is available on our webpage Grantees.

1. End of Life Psychedelic Care (EOLPC), Ashland, Oregon — $75,025
Collaboration between EOLPC, Institute for Rural Psychedelic Care (IRPC) in Arcata, California, and Ligare in Savannah, Georgia. The pilot program will deliver home-based ketamine therapy integrated with spiritual care for hospice and palliative patients across three sites in the US. The team includes Christine Caldwell; Michael Fratkin, MD; Hunt Priest; Gayle Bereskin, DO; Catherine Durkin Robinson; Sherika Newman, DO; Aubrey Gates; and Diana Noyes.

2. Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota — $82,405.70
Brain cancer has one of the highest mortality rates of all cancers, causing many patients who face the diagnosis deep distress. Using an integrative oncology approach, the Mayo Clinic will run the first-ever clinical trial of psilocybin-assisted therapy for patients with brain tumors and existential distress. The research team includes Stacy D’Andre, MD; Ken Olivier, MD; Maria Lapid, MD; Andrea Randall. PharmD; and Ugur Sener, MD.

3.  PRATI & Pravan Foundation, Colorado and Puerto Rico — $75,000

Through this grant, 20 hospice workers, palliative care providers, and doulas will be trained to deliver psychedelic-assisted therapy for existential distress in Puerto Rico, which has independent authority to reschedule psychedelic medicines., The teaching team includes Christine Pateros, MA, RN; Wilhelmina De Castro, LCSW;  Mary Cosimano LMSW; Darren Fisher RN, BSN; Charlotte Charfen, MD; Carmen Amezcua MD; and German Ascani, MD.

4. Red Willow Hospice, Taos, New Mexico — $100,000
This grant to a leading hospice provider in New Mexico will train hospice staff and provide ketamine-assisted psychotherapy (KAP) to terminally ill patients. Red Willow Hospice serves historically underserved rural populations integrating care for the mind, body, and spirit in their holistic care model. The research team includes Robyn Chavez, RN, BSN, CHCM; Justin Babin; Joanna Hooper, MD; Lynn Nauman; Felicia Cardenas; Jennifer Johnson; Melissa Martinez; Katrina Lucero; Lisa Stolarzyc, MD; Rev. Dr, Ted Wiard; Emma Okamoto; and Lisa Cheek.

5. Heal Ukraine Trauma, Cambridge, Massachusetts and Kyiv, Ukraine — $46,130
This project will expand trauma-informed group KAP training and services for veterans and their families affected by the devastating physical and emotional effects of war in Ukraine. The research team includes Amy Goodrich; Oksana Gryschenko, PhD; and Iryna Holub. 

6. University of Washington, Seattle, Washington — $100,000
This grant will fund a pilot that uses psilocybin therapy for cancer-related anxiety and depression in a group setting during a multi-day retreat. Findings from the project will offer insights into how a group setting might make psilocybin therapy more accessible to terminally ill patients. The research team includes Anthony Back, MD, and Bonnie McGregor, Ph.D.

7. Institute for Rural Psychedelic Care, Arcata, California — $87,700
This project will provide KAP and narrative medicine programs to terminally ill patients in rural communities. Patients treated with KAP will engage in interviews with a documentary filmmaker and photographer, answering open-ended questions aimed at helping them make meaning of their lives and end-of-life, and creating a legacy that helps ease death anxiety. The research team includes Michael Fratkin, MD; Carrie Griffin, MD; and Justin Maxon.

“At Healing Hearts, Changing Minds, we aim to support research and therapies that help people live fully and meaningfully, even as they face serious, life-threatening illness. Psychedelic assisted therapy has enormous and largely untapped potential to improve the care and support we provide to them,” said the organization's founder Robert Ansin. ”Taken together, these seven projects reflect the heart of HHCM’s trust-based philanthropic model: listening closely to community needs, supporting locally rooted organizations, and strengthening the ecosystem of psychedelic-assisted care. Together, they exemplify our Ripple Model of Good Effects—advancing healing at the individual, community, and systemic levels—while upholding HHCM’s commitment to employing gold-standard methodologies.”

About Healing Hearts, Changing Minds
HHCM is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit foundation dedicated to expanding access to compassionate, culturally responsive psychedelic-assisted therapy. Through trust-based philanthropy, HHCM partners with frontline organizations that support healing, dignity, and empowerment across diverse communities.

Leathersmithe.comwww.leathersmithe.com/politicshandcraftsenvironme/the-psychedelic-experience.pdf

The Psychedelic Experience.Pdf - Leathersmithe

by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner & Richard Alpert. Page 2. General ... The Tibetan Book of the Dead, or the Bardo Thodol, is a book of instructions ...

Archive.orgarchive.org/download/lp_the-psychedelic-experience_dr-timothy-leary-ralph-metzner-richard-alp/lp_the-psychedelic-experience_dr-timothy-leary-ralph-metzner-richard-alp.pdf

The Psychedelic Experience

* Leary, Timothy, Metzner, Ralph & Alpert, Richard. The Psychedelic Experience. A Manual Based on the. Tibetan Book of the Dead. New Hyde Park: University.

 

 AUDIOBOOK

 

Nfb.cawww.nfb.ca/film/tibetan_book_of_the_dead_the_great_liberation/

The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation - NFB

The Tibetan Book of the Dead is a two-part series that explores ancient teachings on death and dying. It was filmed over a four-month period on location in the ...

Theconversation.comtheconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-the-tibetan-book-of-the-dead-172962

Guide to the classics: the Tibetan Book of the Dead - The Conversation

Apr 5, 2022 ... The Tibetan Book of the Dead is an exemplar of Tibetan literary prose and a compelling commentary on the universal experience of death and dying from a ...

Archive.orgarchive.org/details/in.gov.ignca.16167

Tibetan book of the dead : Evans-Wentz, W.Y. - Internet Archive

Nov 4, 2017 ... Book Title: Tibetan book of the dead Book Author: Evans-Wentz, WY Book Language: English Number of Pages: 346 Publisher: Oxford University Press; London; 1957

 

Mountain snow and water forecasting tool developed by WSU researchers

Washington State University

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PULLMAN, Wash. — A new tool developed by Washington State University researchers could someday provide daily or weekly forecasts of water availability in the mountains similar to a weather forecast that agencies could use for important water management decisions.

The researchers recently presented their forecast tool for snow-water equivalent, which predicts potential water availability, at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Singapore.

Compared to existing approaches as well as state-of-the-art models, the researchers found that their tool works better than current snow-water equivalent measurement forecasting methods for about 90% of locations for daily forecasts and about 70-80% of locations for weekly forecasts.

“Snow-water equivalent is critical for decision making because it tells you how much water would be available from the melted snow, which would go through streamflow or watersheds,” said Krishu Thapa, first author on the work and a graduate student in WSU’s School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

In the mountains of the Western U.S., 50–80% of annual streamflow originates from melting winter snowpack. A forecast of the snow-water equivalent is critical both for short- and long-term water management, such as for more accurately predicting short-term flooding events during storms or for better long-term planning for summer irrigation, hydropower, and fisheries needs.

There are 822 snow measurement stations throughout the Western U.S. that provide daily information on the snow-water equivalent at each site. However, the stations are sparsely distributed with approximately one every 1,500 square miles. Even a short distance away from a station, snow measurements can change dramatically depending on factors like the area’s topography. Water managers take information on the current snow-water equivalent and stream flows and look at information from past events to help them inform their decision making.

“What this forecasting does is take that to the next level,” said Kirti Rajagopalan, assistant professor in the School of Biological Systems and a co-author on the paper. “Instead of just looking at years in the past, we can fine-tune our model into a smaller subset of future states that are relevant.”

For their work, the researchers used artificial intelligence to develop a forecast model to predict the daily and weekly snow-water equivalent. They evaluated the model on data from more than 500 snow measurement sites around the U.S. West. The model performed well because the researchers brought together both temporal and spatial aspects of the data.

“We are trying to include information in both space and time,” said Thapa.

In the work, the researchers were also able to provide valuable information on the uncertainty of their forecasts. Like with a weather forecast, having information on how certain the forecast is can help people make better decisions.

“The most important thing is how confident we are about those predictions because the decisions that water managers make are going to impact people,” said Bhupinderjeet Singh, another co-author who completed his doctorate on this work at WSU.

The researchers next are working to build a dashboard to provide the real-time forecasting that managers will eventually be able to use. They also want to be able to integrate weather forecasting and streamflow forecasts into their model. Once their work is in an easy-to-use dashboard, they will continue to track how well it does.

“I think that having an integrated way of being able to forecast interdependent variables is important,” said co-author Ananth Kalyanaraman, director of the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “The current technology is to mostly predict variables individually. If we can tie that up in a much more integrated fashion, that would represent an advancement in the current way in which this information is being used.”

The work was funded by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the WSU-led AgAid Institute.

 

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DOI

10.48550/arXiv.2511.08856 

Method of Research

Computational simulation/modeling

Article Title

Forecasting Snow-Water Equivalent with an Uncertainty-Aware Attention Model

 

A rich social environment is associated with better cognitive health outcomes for older adults, study finds

With awareness growing that lack of social connection may be a health hazard, researchers say it’s important for the public to better understand the connections

McGill University

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Research by an interdisciplinary team from McGill University and Université Laval provides new insights into the links between social factors and cognitive health among aging adults.

While previous research had found positive correlations between specific measures of social connectedness and a variety of health outcomes, this study appears to have been the first to create profiles aggregating multiple social factors and to see how those correlated with cognitive health in older adults, the researchers said.

The team derived three social environment categories (weaker, intermediate and richer) by assembling 24 social variables – reflecting such elements as network size, social support, social cohesion and social isolation – using data from approximately 30,000 participants in the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA). That data is from a nationally representative cohort of randomly selected Canadians ages 45-84 at the time baseline information was collected.

For cognition, the researchers examined three domains: executive function, episodic memory and prospective memory, using data from a battery of tests previously administered to CLSA participants.

Higher social scores, higher cognitive scores

“We identified significant associations between the social profiles and all three cognitive domains, with the intermediate and richer profiles generally exhibiting better cognitive outcomes than the weaker profile,” explained Daiva Nielsen, Associate Professor at the McGill School of Human Nutrition and co-first author of the paper.

The researcher noted that the effect size of the associations (a statistical measure assessing the strength of the relationship between variables) was, however, relatively small, which is in keeping with previous studies on this topic.

Nielsen noted that the effect sizes were somewhat stronger for participants who were 65 or older. According to the researcher, this suggests that the social environment-cognition association may be more significant in later stages of life.

The science of social connection and cognitive health

Awareness has been increasing of the importance of social connection in public health.

“Lack of social connection has been shown to be comparable to more widely acknowledged disease risk factors such as smoking, physical inactivity and obesity. It is important to translate this knowledge to the public to empower individuals to help build meaningful connections within their communities,” she said.

The authors did note that the associations found in the current study are correlational rather than causal, and it is possible, for example, that poor cognitive health also leads individuals to withdraw from social life.

The power of interdisciplinary research

The team, whose members stem from such diverse fields as marketing, human behaviour, nutrition and epidemiology, hopes to continue using CLSA data and the newly created social profiles in future research, said Nielsen.

The next steps involve studying changes in social environments and various health-related outcomes, including diet and chronic disease risk, she added.

“This work is an excellent example of the benefits of multidisciplinary research teams that can tackle complex research questions and bring diverse knowledge and expertise,” she concluded.

About the study

Social environment profiles and cognitive outcomes: a cross-sectional latent class analysis using the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging, by Katherine Labonté, Daiva E. Nielsen, Laurette Dubé and Catherine Paquet, was published in Aging & Mental Health.

This research was supported by a Canadian Institutes of Health Research Catalyst Grant.

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Journal

Aging & Mental Health

DOI

10.1080/13607863.2025.2581096 

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Social environment profiles and cognitive outcomes: a cross-sectional latent class analysis using the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging