Galina began her career in non-profit development ten years ago at the Downtown Women’s Center, a center for homeless women in Los Angeles’ Skid Row, and has since worked for Friends of the Los Angeles River, the group behind America’s largest urban river cleanup, served as a resident volunteer at Tashirat Orphanage in the remote mountains of Tepoztlán, Mexico, and has become involved with a diverse swath of intersecting social and environmental justice movements as a volunteer, event producer, writer, and fundraiser.
She was first introduced to MAPS at the Psychedelic Science 2013 conference in Oakland, California, where she volunteered to interview attendees about their psychedelic experiences for a short video. Profoundly moved by their stories, her interest in the potential of psychedelics for transformative personal and collective healing soon became a reverent fascination, and she is thrilled to join the MAPS team in service to this vision. She is originally from California and attended the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she studied English. Galina currently lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, is a certified yoga instructor, and enjoys live jazz, old books, calligraphy, thrift stores, and river picnics.