We envision a future where the businesses delivering psychedelic healing are profoundly shaped by psychedelic wisdom, committed to not replicate the world as it is but to model the world as it could be.
Our Vision:
Nearly everyone at North Star has volunteered their time since the beginning because of a shared passion for the mission.
Our team is comprised of psychedelic advocates from different coalitions in the field, with a shared commitment to seeing psychedelic business - and business as a whole - transform.
Our team is comprised of psychedelic advocates from different coalitions in the field, with a shared commitment to seeing psychedelic business - and business as a whole - transform.
North Star is a labor of love
North Star Team
Liana Sananda Gillooly is a lifelong advocate for social justice, drug policy reform, ending war, and environmental protection. Liana serves as a development officer for MAPS, in addition to her work as a co-founder and Board Chair of North Star. She enjoys wrangling the resources needed to transform our world. She has been a featured speaker at numerous events and lobbied Congress. She a trained death midwife, vipassana meditator, and immersive artist.
Founder and Board Member
Liana Gillooly
Jeff advises and invests in visionary social entrepreneurs in natural products, clean energy, and circular economies. He helps them integrate their values in their business, and leverage their commitment for strategic advantage. In 2020, Jeff founded LocalCode with the mission of helping low income communities generate wealth and wellbeing through regenerative development, starting locally owned enterprises and revitalizing their main streets. Shifting ownership and keeping wealth circulating within communities is at the heart of the change we need in the world. Jeff's personal mission is to design, advise, and co-create businesses and social institutions that bring out the best in human nature. Align human behavior with a sustainable, abundant, just, and beautiful world.
Board Member
Jeff Mendelsohn
At this critical moment in our history the need is very great. So is the opportunity.
Are you passionate about a transformation not only in mental health but business as a whole? Your spirit and your skills belong here, as an advocate, supporter, or volunteer.
Are you passionate about a transformation not only in mental health but business as a whole? Your spirit and your skills belong here, as an advocate, supporter, or volunteer.
You belong here
Some of our Psychedelic Constellations authors:
North Star Project stands in solidarity with black communities. Black lives matter. The murder of George Floyd by police sits along with many murders, including Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade and Breonna Taylor, as a blight on the American promise of freedom.
BLACK LIVES MATTER
"Psychedelic commercialization must not reproduce the same power structures that have brought about this moment in our country. It is not just capitalism. It is not just patriarchy. It is white power."
Today the leaders of psychedelic business are mostly white. The vast majority are men. It is to this fact that North Star points when we say the people with the most structural power have the greatest moral responsibility to make change.
North Star's Founding Team
Co-Founder
Co-Founder
Co-Founder
Tim Chang is a veteran investor passionate about upleveling the venture paradigm. He's part of a movement to transcend scale-at-any-cost investing by centering the question, "is this good for people, society and planet?" In his role as a partner at Mayfield Fund, Tim puts emphasis on the self-work of entrepreneurs.
Shirelle Noble is a systems-thinker who brings over 10 years of strategy, operations, and management experience. Formerly a consultant at Bain & Company, she led and scaled global teams in rapid growth environments. She is a practitioner of Hatha yoga and meditation and Zendo-trained peer support sitter.
Kat is a practicing psychotherapist, founder of Auryn Project, North Star's parent nonprofit, co-founder of North Star, an advisor to Chacruna, president of the board of Sage Institute and former board member of Threshold Foundation. Kat is passionate about equity, social justice, and access in psychedelic healing.
Co-Founder
Liana Sananda Gillooly is a lifetime activist for social justice, drug policy reform, ending war, and the environment. She is currently a Development Officer at MAPS. Liana has lobbied Congress, lectured MBA students, and given a TedX talk. She is an experienced meditator and trained death midwife.
Co-Founder
David Alder is an artist and storyteller focused on movements of healing and the edge of cultural change. David is the author of We Will Call It Pala, a work of graphic fiction depicting a psychedelic future gone awry, and a founding member of North Star, and former interim Executive Director. David now runs his storytelling house Here & Now Studios full time.
Stay Connected
We invite you to take the North Star Ethics Pledge and to share your own ethics statement far and wide. If you'd like to support North Star - in time, resources, or feedback - please email us, [email protected].
Pledge Creation Process
The North Star team came together after the publishing of We Will Call It Pala. Each of us saw a need to raise a critical dialogue around integrity in the commercialization of psychedelics. We shared a concern that moneyed interests were not only going to take power, but control the narrative. We believed there could be a better way.
Thus began a six month process of community dialogue. It started with a dinner with twenty of the elders we respect and admire most, asking questions around their hopes and fears for this moment in psychedelics, and what they'd like to see done. Similar dinners happened with clinicians and therapists, asking for their perspectives on commercialization and what would support them in this time, and investors oriented around impact. Here a concern was raised of a "nuclear arms race" effect, where unethical actors would have a competitive advantage to seize power, rapidly scale and control the narrative.
During this time gathering perspective, the North Star team was distilling the feedback into categories, the basis for the principles, and researching other examples of ethics commitments across industries and time. From that point forward the pledge went through four drafts, with one on one feedback with dozens and dozens of stakeholders representing different coalitions in the field.
The principles in the pledge, and the possible actions, are generated by the community. We see our role at North Star as stewarding this process, soliciting perspectives, opinions, concerns, considerations and feedback. This is reflected in the framing of the pledge - it is participatory, not prescriptive. It doesn't tell anyone how they have to behave. It invites people into a dialogue with themselves and others around what it means to put integrity at the heart of their work in the field. The hope for the pledge is that it helps people step into their own power in culture shaping, and serves as the foundation of a community that can take an ethics-first, patient-focused approach to safely scaling psychedelic healing.
Thus began a six month process of community dialogue. It started with a dinner with twenty of the elders we respect and admire most, asking questions around their hopes and fears for this moment in psychedelics, and what they'd like to see done. Similar dinners happened with clinicians and therapists, asking for their perspectives on commercialization and what would support them in this time, and investors oriented around impact. Here a concern was raised of a "nuclear arms race" effect, where unethical actors would have a competitive advantage to seize power, rapidly scale and control the narrative.
During this time gathering perspective, the North Star team was distilling the feedback into categories, the basis for the principles, and researching other examples of ethics commitments across industries and time. From that point forward the pledge went through four drafts, with one on one feedback with dozens and dozens of stakeholders representing different coalitions in the field.
The principles in the pledge, and the possible actions, are generated by the community. We see our role at North Star as stewarding this process, soliciting perspectives, opinions, concerns, considerations and feedback. This is reflected in the framing of the pledge - it is participatory, not prescriptive. It doesn't tell anyone how they have to behave. It invites people into a dialogue with themselves and others around what it means to put integrity at the heart of their work in the field. The hope for the pledge is that it helps people step into their own power in culture shaping, and serves as the foundation of a community that can take an ethics-first, patient-focused approach to safely scaling psychedelic healing.
