Applicants to Naropa University’s Psilocybin Facilitator Training (PFT) program were left feeling confused and surprised after receiving a Nov. 21 email stating that the program would not be running in January, and application fees would be refunded.
“Due to unforeseen circumstances, applications for the PFT program have been closed until further notice. The program will not be offered with a January 2025 start as originally planned,” the message from the Naropa Center for Psychedelic Studies team reads. The application period was scheduled to close Nov. 24.
The cancellation, according to Naropa President Chuck Lief, is tied to the university’s insurance provider.
“Our insurer, fairly late into the renewal process, decided that they were not comfortable with the training happening through the university,” Lief said in a phone call with Boulder Weekly. Naropa is in the process of creating a new entity outside the university that will host the course. The faculty and curriculum will remain the same, he added.
The course was scheduled to begin on Jan. 21 — just two months after cancellation emails were sent to applicants. While Lief expects the transition to take 60 days, he “didn’t want people to hear at the very last minute.”
“It’s unfortunate how abrupt it needed to be,” he said, “but the university broadly has to have insurance coverage, for obvious reasons, so we didn’t have much choice.”
“Honestly, I was just a little frustrated,” said Catherine Kurfman, who received the email three weeks after submitting her application. “I’m super bummed; I was really looking forward to getting into that program.”
The program has been removed from portions of Naropa’s website, with no information pertaining to its cancellation because “the new insurers that we’re working with didn’t want to see anything on our website that suggested Naropa was doing psychedelic training,” Lief said.
"This is the kind of bump in the road that we didn’t really need, but it’s not shocking.”
The university had planned to train 60 facilitators in the inaugural year of its program, according to previous reporting from Boulder Weekly.
Naropa’s is one of five natural medicine programs in Colorado accredited to train psilocybin facilitators, according to the Department of Colorado Regulatory Agencies website. Facilitator training programs were made possible when Gov. Jared Polis signed the Natural Medicine Regulation law in May 2023, following the will of the voters in passing Proposition 122.
Regulations were finalized in September, and the state will begin accepting applications for licenses on Dec. 31 of this year.
The program’s cancellation comes several months after Naropa announced the sale of its main campus at 2130 Arapahoe to an undisclosed buyer in August. The original course planned to be entirely remote, with Naropa suggesting an optional 40-hour in-person practicum to be facilitated by organizations not connected with the university.
In an emailed update, Lief wrote that Naropa was "close to completing the various modifications needed to transfer our certification to the new entity," formed Nov. 25. "When that happens, the staff will be able to create a revised training calendar."
This article has been updated to include additional comments from Lief.
This story was updated at 4:30 p.m. on Nov. 25 to add information obtained in an interview with Naropa University President Chuck Lief.