Safer festivals through PsyCare
Festivals are places of connection, music, and shared experiences. In such dynamic and stimulating environments, some people occasionally feel overwhelmed or encounter challenging moments.
PsyCare provides compassionate, specialized support for people facing these difficulties during their festival experience. Our approach is to minimize risks and prevent harm through education, prevention, and care. We offer calm and supportive spaces as well as trained volunteers on site. PsyCare helps ensure that challenging experiences can be addressed early, safely, and with care. Our goal is a safe, more mindful and supportive festival environments for everyone.
Bringing science-based psychological support and psychedelic education to Swiss festivals
ALPS is a Swiss non-profit organization dedicated to psychedelic education, research, and responsible public dialogue around psychoactive substances. As part of this mission, ALPS is taking over and continuing the important harm-reduction work previously carried out by Eve & Rave.
Much of our work focuses on scientific exchange and education in academic and professional settings. But we believe education should not stop there. Education should also reach the environments where real-life experiences take place, promoting awareness, prevention and well-being.
Our newest initiative, ALPS PsyCare, brings this mission directly into festival environments. This serves our new project as the perfect platform to combine scientific knowledge, community engagement, and compassionate care. When people know that non-judgmental support is available, they are more likely to seek help early. This can prevent small problems from becoming serious incidents.
What the funding will support
To realize our vision, we require CHF 7,500. These funds will go directly into the planning, preparation, and implementation of PsyCare services on-site at festivals.
The money will be used for:
• Training and preparation of volunteers
• Harm reduction and educational materials
• Informational resources for safer consumption
• Equipment and setup of PsyCare areas at festivals
• Logistics and operational costs for our teams
Every contribution helps us build the necessary infrastructure to provide reliable harm reduction and psychological support on-site.
If we receive more donations, our next goal would be CHF 15,000. This would allow us to improve both fairness and quality within PsyCare, as well as strengthen and expand the project as a long-term harm reduction initiative.
In Switzerland, drug policy is based on four pillars: repression, therapy, prevention, and harm reduction. PsyCare contributes directly to this fourth pillar by supporting people who experience challenging states under the influence of psychedelics in festival environments.
With additional support, we can:
• Ensure fair compensation for helpers
While other professional groups, such as security staff, are typically paid at festivals, PsyCare helpers often work on a voluntary basis. We aim to change this and use additional donations to appropriately compensate the valuable contributions of our on-site team.
• Enable more professional staff and insights into psychedelic contexts
By specifically recruiting nurses, social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, and therapists, we can provide highly qualified support and thus increase safety for festival attendees. Additionally, PsyCare can serve as a learning environment for professionals to gain experience in working with altered states of consciousness.
• Collect evidence-based data on current substance use
We can gain anonymized insights into the experiences and needs of people seeking support. This data can contribute to research and improve harm reduction strategies in Switzerland.
• Expand PsyCare to future events
Burning Mountain Festival is just the beginning. A successful implementation will help establish PsyCare as a model that can support other festivals, including smaller events.
Together, these efforts contribute to safer festivals and evidence-based harm reduction.
