The International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research & Service (ICEERS) is a charitable non-profit organization with United Nations consultative status (ECOSOC), founded in 2009. ICEERS has worked for over a decade around the challenges and opportunities related to the globalization of diverse cultural practices related to ayahuasca, iboga and other ethnobotanicals and the knowledge systems they are part of.
ICEERS has conducted extensive scientific research and published numerous peer-reviewed scientific papers, book chapters and expert reports about public policy, human rights, indigenous rights, mental and public health, therapeutic potential and law and drug policy in relation to traditional plant medicine. Through its program called ADF (Ayahuasca Defense Fund) it has worked with over 150 legal cases related to ayahuasca and other traditional plants providing scientific evidence and human rights perspectives to these cases. It has a large trajectory of advocacy work at the regional, national and international level and has written several regulation drafts for policy makers.
ICEERS is the organizer of the World Ayahuasca Conference, of which the third edition in 2019 united over 1400 people from 35 countries. In addition ICEERS has supported hundreds of people going through challenging experiences after participating in sessions with plant medicine world wide since 2013, and has made all lessons learned available to communities in different countries, seeding initiatives of bottom-up, self regulation, to move towards safe and ethical ethnobotanical practices in different countries.
ICEERS has been working since 2017 with the indigenous grassroots organization UMIYAC, and is dedicated to fostering the coming together in alliance of diverse knowledge systems to collectively regenerate and strengthen the communities that hold ancestral wisdom and together lay out strategies to address our current human and planetary crisis at the root.