Etheridge Foundation Funds GATHER Project by Good Medicine Collective
The Etheridge Foundation is pleased to announce a $34,000 grant to the Good Medicine Collective to fund an innovative new model of care at Riverbird Clinic in Portland, Maine.
GATHER (Group-Assisted Therapy, Healing, and Expanded Recovery) is a pilot program designed to evaluate the feasibility of delivering group ketamine-assisted therapy for people in recovery within a community-based setting.
The program incorporates structured preparation and integration supports — including mindfulness, breathwork, and peer reflection — intended to extend recovery beyond the immediate pharmacologic effects of ketamine, building on evidence that structured preparation and integration are key to sustained benefit.
This approach understands addiction and trauma recovery not only as a reduction of symptoms, but as the cultivation of recovery capital: the personal, social, and community resources that sustain long-term health and resilience.
Within this framework, individual healing is inseparable from the environments and relationships that surround a person. Group-based programs grounded in mutual support, shared insight, and collective meaning-making may strengthen community recovery ecosystems as much as they support individual change.
Validated tools such as the Assessment of Recovery Capital (ARC) will help measure these strengths across domains such as social support, coping skills, and community connectedness.
Riverbird Clinic provides a unique community-centered setting for the GATHER program. As one of the region’s first clinics dedicated to integrative approaches to psychedelic-assisted therapy, Riverbird offers medical oversight and trauma-informed psychotherapy within a network shaped by the Good Medicine Collective — a nonprofit collaborative that bridges integrative medicine, social healing, and community well-being.
This partnership ensures that participants are supported not only by clinical staff, but also by a broader ecosystem of community health resources. Riverbird’s interdisciplinary team brings expertise in family medicine, psychiatry, psychotherapy, integrative healing, and recovery support, with established protocols for ketamine administration and group-based care informed by community values of safety, connection, and mutual support.
Emerging evidence suggests that ketamine-assisted therapy may influence multiple domains relevant to addiction recovery, including not only mood symptoms but also aspects of functioning, connection, and meaning.
Ketamine is classified as a dissociative anesthetic, with a well-characterized safety profile at sub-anesthetic doses, where it functions primarily as an NMDA receptor antagonist and modulates glutamatergic signaling. These neurochemical effects underlie ketamine’s rapid antidepressant and anti-anxiety properties, distinguishing it from traditional treatments.
In therapeutic contexts, ketamine’s capacity to temporarily disrupt rigid patterns of thought and enhance neuroplasticity may create a window of opportunity for psychological flexibility and meaning-making. When paired with structured preparation and integration, these pharmacologic effects can be directed toward deeper processing of trauma, attachment wounding, and recovery-related challenges.
Building on Riverbird’s prior group-based ketamine programs — which have demonstrated feasibility, acceptability, and broad improvements in mood and trauma symptoms in quality-improvement contexts — GATHER integrates recovery capital measures to assess progress across diverse domains of well-being.
The focus of this pilot is to evaluate feasibility in a real-world clinical and community setting, and examine how a structured, group-based, expanded-state model can be delivered safely, consistently, and in a way that meaningfully supports participants’ recovery journeys.
The insights gained will guide the further development of the program, support future community implementation, and help inform providers seeking accessible, integrative approaches to long-term recovery.
Ultimately, GATHER may provide a safe and effective model for group ketamine-assisted therapy that supports recovery in a community-based setting, that can be duplicated successfully in other places.
