The legacy of Ann and Sasha Shulgin is more than simply remarkable history. It offers the basis for an actionable future of continued deep international impact, and the Shulgin Foundation is laying the physical and intellectual groundwork to bring this potential to life.
Ann and Sasha Shulgin were two extraordinary people whose work changed lives, advanced fields of inquiry, and helped shape psychedelic culture. Their contributions were distinct and deeply complementary. Sasha’s groundbreaking scientific research expanded our understanding of psychoactive compounds, while Ann’s intellectual, psychological, and literary work helped illuminate the therapeutic value of psychedelics and the complexities of human experience.
What they left behind is equally rich. Hundreds of thousands of scientific papers, books, correspondence, recordings, photographs, personal artifacts, and a powerful published body of knowledge. It also includes their historic Farm and Lab, and perhaps most importantly, the community of kindred spirits that formed around them and continues to grow through their work.
The Shulgin Foundation has inherited the stewardship of the Shulgin Legacy, and over the last year we’ve come to understand something important: these elements are not separate pieces of history, and together, they constitute a living legacy with enormous potential.
This realization has fundamentally changed how we think about our responsibility and the future we are working to create.
What Does Responsible Stewardship Really Mean?
When the Foundation was first established, the immediate priorities were clear. The historic Farm and Lab needed to be secured, cared for, and supported by an organization capable of sustaining them for future generations.
But as our work progressed, a larger question began to emerge. Is responsible stewardship simply ensuring that these extraordinary resources survive, or do we have a greater responsibility to make them available, useful, generative, and alive?
This question has driven much of our strategic work over the past year. Through an intensive process of planning, stakeholder consultation, and organizational development, we have arrived at a much clearer understanding of what the Shulgin Foundation can become.
We now see our future through three interdependent pillars: Place, Community, and Knowledge.
These are not simply three areas of programming. They are three dimensions of a unified vision, each with its own purpose and each made more powerful through its relationship with the others.
Our work is to develop the infrastructure, resources, and reach necessary for all three to flourish.
PLACE: A Living Home for the Shulgin Legacy
The Shulgin Farm is unique, and irreplaceable. Sasha’s laboratory, the family home, and the surrounding landscape comprise a physical environment where decades of scientific discovery, intellectual exploration, and community life unfolded.
Visitors to the Farm often describe the experience as something remarkable. There is a profound sense of history, but also an intimacy and immediacy that makes the legacy feel very much alive.
What we can accomplish today at the Farm is constrained by the property’s existing infrastructure. Our long-term development plan addresses a central challenge: how can we make this historic place capable of fulfilling its place-based potential without compromising the character that makes it extraordinary?
We envision thoughtful improvements that will create more opportunities for education, research, conversation, and gathering. Over time, the Farm will welcome visiting scholars, host intimate residential programs, and be a center for meaningful exchange among people working across disciplines.
The Farm is not, and will not become, a monument to the past. Our future is in the curation of living, breathing spaces where the legacy can continue to inspire discovery, connection, and new ideas.
COMMUNITY: The People Who Bring the Legacy to Life
Community is not simply an audience for the Foundation. It is an essential part of the inheritance, and an active participant in what we are building.
What made the Shulgin Farm special was never just a physical place. It was also the incredible diversity of people who gathered there and the openness with which Ann and Sasha welcomed them into their world.
Scientists and therapists, chemists and artists, thinkers and seekers came together around shared curiosity. Knowledge moved through friendship, conversation, experimentation, spirited debate, shared meals, and gatherings that crossed disciplinary and generational boundaries.
That spirit continues at the Farm today, and it is central to the Foundation’s vision for the future.
Through public programs, private gatherings, a future of exploration through psychedelic practice, digital conversations, and partnerships with people and institutions doing consequential work, we are building a contemporary home for this kind of exchange. Our aim is to connect the wisdom and experience of earlier generations with the researchers, practitioners, and emerging thinkers who are shaping the future of psychedelic science and culture.
Sometimes this work takes the form of a substantive interdisciplinary conversation or an educational program. Just as often, it happens over a shared meal, a casual introduction, or a potluck in the garden.
KNOWLEDGE: Bringing an Extraordinary Archive into the World
Perhaps the most far-reaching opportunity before us lies within the Shulgin Archive.
The collection includes approximately 250,000 documents, 40,000 photographs, hundreds of books, personal correspondence, datebooks, recordings, artifacts, and decades of intellectual and scientific work. Many of the items contain handwritten annotations, and countless documents offer insight into the thinking, relationships, and processes that informed Ann and Sasha’s contributions.
It is an astonishing resource, the vast majority of which has never been meaningfully accessible to researchers, practitioners, historians, students, or the broader public.
The opportunity before us is to transform this immense collection into an active body of knowledge, asset by asset. By organizing and interpreting the physical materials, and developing publications, educational programs, and media, we can bring their value to audiences around the world. Erowid’s digital work in making a subset of the material searchable and accessible to the public will also be a much celebrated accomplishment.
Imagine the possibilities of a carefully curated (privacy-protected) publication drawn from Ann’s therapeutic writings. Such a resource could inform new educational offerings, inspire interdisciplinary conversations, and create opportunities for researchers and practitioners to engage with ideas that might otherwise remain hidden in the psychedelic underground.
This is where the reach of the Foundation begins to expand dramatically. Education and media can carry this precious knowledge far beyond the physical boundaries of the Farm.
The Farm is where this legacy lives, but the Farm is not the limit of how far it can reach.
Building an Institution Around a Coherent Vision
For many years, individual elements of this vision have been visible. What has changed through our recent strategic work is that we can now see how they fit together and how each element can strengthen the others.
The Farm creates experiences and provides a physical home for the legacy. The Archive supplies extraordinary knowledge, while education makes that knowledge understandable and useful. Publishing and media carry it into the wider world, and community brings people, ideas, and opportunities together.
Supporting all of this is the Foundation itself, an organization being developed with the leadership, financial resources, partnerships, and operational capacity necessary to sustain this work over time.
This is much more than a collection of programs or a historic property project. We are building an institution around a coherent idea, with the potential to become a significant international resource for psychedelic education, inquiry, and culture.
From Vision to Plan
Our vision is no longer simply aspirational. Over the past year, we have undertaken comprehensive strategic planning, developed a multi-year financial model, advanced our property development plans, and begun building the organizational capacity required to support the next stage of the Foundation’s growth.
We now have a clearer understanding of what the coming six years will require, and a roadmap for moving from the Foundation we are today toward the institution we intend to become.
An important part of that plan is the thoughtful development of the Farm itself.
A New Educational Center at the Farm
Our first major property development priority is transforming the existing Barn into a welcoming and versatile educational center. This project will create beautiful, functional spaces for learning and gathering, while also providing fire-safe storage for important archival materials.
The completed center is envisioned as an open, spacious, and comfortable environment, designed to support a diverse range of educational programs, workshops, and interdisciplinary gatherings. It will also provide an intimate setting for the kind of thoughtful, transformative work that has long been associated with the Shulgin Farm.
Creating Overnight Opportunities for Deeper Engagement
Further along in our development plan, we envision introducing a small number of tasteful, low-profile overnight accommodations integrated into the landscape.
These facilities will allow the Foundation to host intimate residential workshops and educational experiences, creating opportunities for deeper engagement with the Farm, the Archive, and the worldwide community surrounding the Shulgin legacy.
By combining a historic setting with thoughtfully developed educational programming, we believe the Farm can become a destination for high-impact learning experiences with national and international reach.
From Protecting Possibility to Building It
The future we are describing is significantly larger than the Foundation as it exists today, and institutions of this kind are never built by founders or staff alone. They are built by communities of people who recognize the value of a shared vision and choose to invest in making it real.
Many people have already helped bring the Shulgin Foundation to this point. Some have contributed financially, while others have offered expertise, introductions, volunteer hours, professional guidance, or simply the steadfast commitment of continuing to show up.
That early belief has made it possible for us to envision a future of this scale. We are profoundly grateful for the generosity and trust that have brought us this far.
Now, we are entering a new phase in which we are moving from protecting possibility to actively building it.
Doing so will require significant philanthropic investment, not only in the physical property, but also in people, knowledge, programming, and the organizational infrastructure that will allow this work to flourish for generations.
Our current $3.5 million Capital Campaign represents a critical step toward realizing this vision. We invite those who believe in the importance of the Shulgin legacy to join us as active partners in building its future, whether through major gifts, expertise, institutional partnerships, advocacy, or community engagement. We have already raised almost $1M toward this goal!
We are not simply asking you to support the Shulgin Foundation. We are inviting you to help build what it can become.
What Can a Legacy Become?
The extraordinary contributions of Ann and Sasha Shulgin have already influenced generations of scientists, practitioners, artists, and seekers. The question before us now is how we can carry that legacy forward in ways that remain meaningful, relevant, and generative for generations to come.
The Shulgin Legacy is a place people can visit and experience their own synthetic psychedelic heritage, a community people can belong to, and a body of knowledge the world can learn from. Together, these elements can create a living resource with the capacity to inspire people we may never meet and contribute to discoveries and conversations we cannot yet imagine.
That is the future we intend to build, and we hope you will build it with us.