Our Approach
Root To Rise brings together education, lived experience, community and complementary wellbeing.
We work alongside the medical model, while recognising that prescriptions and consultations do not address every part of a person’s wellbeing experience.
Our foundations
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We’re developing resources to support informed reflection and more intentional decision-making in plant medicine and wellbeing.
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Community helps reduce isolation and brings people together around common questions, values and experiences in plant medicine and wellbeing.
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We recognise that wellbeing is not only intellectual. It may also be explored through movement, breath, rest, mindfulness and other complementary practices.
Beyond consultations
We recognise that medical care provides access, assessment and treatment.
Access has improved, product choice has expanded and more people can now legally obtain plant medicine. Yet many still encounter rushed consultations, fragmented support, stigma, uncertainty and systems that do not always reflect the complexity of their experience. People are still left to navigate questions of uncertainty, trial and error, daily wellbeing and their relationship with plant medicine largely on their own, or on online community forums.
We create opportunities for people to learn, connect and explore complementary approaches to wellbeing without replacing their relationship with qualified healthcare professionals.
Evidence and lived experience
We value scientific evidence, professional knowledge as well as lived experience.
Evidence helps us understand what is known, what remains uncertain and where caution is required. Lived experience helps us understand how systems, practices and plant medicine are actually experienced in people’s lives.
We do not treat personal experience as clinical proof. We also do not dismiss it simply because it cannot always be captured within a consultation or research study.
Our role is to hold both with curiosity, context and care.
Peer support
Peer support is grounded in shared experience, mutual respect and connection.
It creates space for people to speak openly about what they have experienced, what has helped, what remains difficult and what they wish existed within the current system.
Peer support is not about giving medical advice or telling others what they should do. It is about listening, exchanging perspectives and helping people feel less isolated as they make sense of their own experience.
Where peer-led programs are offered, they will be developed with clear boundaries, appropriate facilitation and respect for privacy, consent and participant agency.
Collaboration
Root To Rise is built through collaboration.
We work with practitioners, educators, clinicians, peer workers, facilitators and community partners who bring different forms of knowledge and experience to the collective.
We believe no single profession or perspective holds the whole answer. Our aim is to create respectful exchange between clinical knowledge, complementary practice and lived experience.
Ethics before expansion
Care requires more than good intentions.
As Root To Rise grows, our programs and partnerships will be guided by consent, transparency, inclusion, participant agency and responsible communication.
We will avoid overstating what any service, practice or experience can achieve. We will be open about uncertainty, conflicts of interest and the limits of our role.
In the long-term, we intend to establish a Research and Ethics Advisory Council, to support the responsible development of programs, educational materials, partnerships and evaluation.
What we don’t do
Root To Rise is not a clinic and does not provide diagnosis, prescriptions, medicines, individual treatment plans or medical advice.
We do not position complementary practices as replacements for appropriate healthcare. Our role is to support education, reflection, connection and complementary wellbeing while maintaining clear professional and ethical boundaries.
We believe people deserve more than access alone.
They deserve information they can understand, spaces where they can speak openly and opportunities to explore wellbeing with greater intention, agency and connection.