Co-Founder

Shannon Hughes MSW, PhD, is co-founder of Elemental Psychedelics, a women-led training organization designed to support practitioners in discovering their own relationship to the psychedelic space with clarity, humility, and integrity. As a former tenured professor in Social Work, she maintains a critical eye towards issues of history, power, and ethics as they relate to the evolving psychedelic landscape. In 2017, Shannon co-founded a Colorado-based non-profit, The Nowak Society, with a mission to build and organize psychedelic professional communities to give voice to the essential values and pressing issues of the psychedelic movement in Colorado. She has also had the good fortune to contribute to psychedelic policy and research through advisory committees and community-partnered research. She served as a non-voting participant on the Qualifications, Training, and Licensing Subcommittee for Colorado's Natural Medicine Advisory Board. Her community-partnered research team recently published a qualitative interview study designed to elevate the voices and practices of "underground" psilocybin practitioners in the ongoing scientific and public discussion regarding psychedelic reform. Shannon strives to bridge scientific, clinical, and spiritual worlds in trainings and retreats so that natural medicine practitioners, as a collective, have the skills, frameworks, and opportunity to build truly transformational practices for our world.