S4_Maya Higa is Hiding the Broccoli

IV.
Upon visiting the last of the animal enclosures, we follow Maya back to Alveus’ offices.
Inside, we greet members of the production staff, who sit scattered across desks filled with several monitors each. A sofa lounges across the middle of the room; mounted in front is a TV, broadcasting several of the animal enclosures live on Alveus’ Twitch channel.

It’s a peaceful setting, and a much slower lifestyle than what I’m accustomed to in Chicago. Part of me feels a pang of jealousy.

Maya says it took a lot of time and effort for the sanctuary to reach this point. “I’ve kind of always thought of my [personal] brand as a funnel into the sanctuary,” she tells me. “And so the more brand recognition I have—going to other streamers, who know that I'm the animal person with the animal sanctuary—the bigger this nonprofit is.”

A couple years ago, her dream was pretty cut-and-dry: get Alveus to the point where it could live on as a standalone entity. “Where if I had a mental breakdown and had to leave for a month, everybody is still getting paid, viewers are learning, and the animals are still getting taken care of,” Maya says.

It required a lot of “scrambling” since Alveus’ founding, but she believes the sanctuary has reached that point. This year, Alveus passed a million combined followers across platforms.

With that strong base intact, a natural question follows: What comes next?

One fan—himself a veteran YouTube creator and science communicator—empathizes with the exciting, nerve-wracking position Maya now finds herself in. “I think one of the hardest things as a creator is going, Okay, I have this attention— what do I do with it?” Hank Green tells me over a video call. “Because the dumb answer to that question is to use it to get more attention.”

Outside, she's surrounded by animals. But inside Alveus' offices, Maya's desk looks just like any other streamer's. / 📸 Shua Buhangin

“And then you use the new attention to get more attention, and you use the newer attention to get more attention, and then eventually you become an attention black hole,” he continues. “And the singularity happens and you're like, Actually, I hate this. I don't know what I'm doing, but everybody's looking at me.”

It’s one thing to experience a viral moment, like Maya did in 2019; it’s another to sustain the flow of attention and maintain your humanity, says Hank. So to better understand where all those views are coming from—and the real people behind them—I reached out to several more of Maya’s fans.

Throughout these conversations, I realized that Alveus has become a regular fixture in their viewers’ lives. Save for becoming a veterinarian, college sophomore Arsen Carangelo believed there were no career paths that would allow her to pursue the dream of working with animals—until she started watching Maya, Kayla, and Connor at the sanctuary every day. “I’m pursuing my animal sciences degree because of Maya,” Arsen tells me.

Oliver Cheseldene-Culley, a recent law school graduate and aspiring environmental attorney, regularly tunes into other streamers like QTCinderella and FaZe Adapt from his home in England. But anytime exam season came around during university, Oliver would put Alveus’ twenty-four-seven Alveus livestream on in the background as he studied. “It calms me, and makes me feel like I’m part of something bigger than myself,” he says.

Past just serving as an inspiration, though, I was curious whether viewers were actually learning (and retaining) anything from Maya’s streams. The answer I received was an emphatic yes.

Oliver began listing off fun facts regarding the strength of parrots' beaks, and dove into detail on the permeable skin of frogs. Arsen mentioned that Maya’s segments on spiders and insects helped her get over her arachnophobia. Rebecca Nieves, a twenty-year-old pre-med student in South Florida, agreed. “With insects, now knowing how important they are to [local ecosystems]...it sounds simple, but it really does give you a worldview change," she tells me. All of a sudden, “you’re actually noticing these things, and you actually want to go outside and find these animals” (“I am the public relations team for insects,” Maya jokes to me).

That education often leads to action. As a college student with a limited budget, Arsen says she can only donate to a finite number of environmental causes she cares about. Nevertheless, whenever Maya shares a petition via Instagram—and explains why viewers should join in signing—Arsen is first in line.

The sophomore also participates in Maya’s ongoing Show and Tell series. Viewers fill out a form on the Alveus website, describing nature-related “things” they’re doing; Maya then shares submission on her stream. “People might be studying for a biology degree, or that they went and did a trash cleanup, or they volunteered at an animal shelter,” Maya tells me. “And so we’re actually tracking, like, community service hours from our community.”

Show and Tell was born out of a collaboration with the World Wildlife Fund, but it’s not Alveus’ first direct partnership with a nonprofit. In recent years, Columbia University researchers began studying the effectiveness of virtual animal education models like Alveus; Maya hopes they publish the data soon so more people “understand the potential” of operating remotely. A new series, Alveus Adventures, has taken viewers everywhere from Dr. Solomon David’s “Gar Lab” at the University of Minnesota to the Whale and Dolphin Conservation in Massachusetts (A regular comment from the channel’s YouTube subscribers: “I wish these videos were even longer”).

For now, Alveus has been more than willing to provide its platform, a vessel to share the attention it receives with organizations it believes in. Nevertheless, Connor, the director of operations, believes they can do even more.

Connor O'Brien (left) and Kayla Jackson (right) are the Director of Operations and the Director of Animal Care & Training, respectively. They moved from Tennessee to Austin in October 2021, becoming two of the first Alveus employees. / 📸 Shua Buhangin

“I almost feel guilty that we’re in this position where we can go live, and (within reason) get a project funded pretty fast, just because we have such an amazing community—and they know where the money is going,” he tells me. “It’s a privilege to be in this position.”

“A lot of our friends are the ones getting cut…this very crucial funding for big conservation stuff,” he continues. “Alveus isn’t in a position to step in yet, but where we’re going, we want to kind of take over…”

Connor pauses, and thinks for a second. “That’s not the right word.”

He believes they can be a major player in conservation. The first step: They’ve found success in helping several universities and research centers set up custom camera rigs, following Alveus’ model by speaking directly to local communities via Twitch. But soon, they'll be able to assist further, plugging gaps and driving innovation in places where federal funding is falling through.

“In three years, I think we'll be able to really do a lot,” he says.

In my conversation with Hank, he opined that the best creators ask themselves a specific question: “What do I want to do that would tap into my skills, my abilities, my interests, my values, and also be good for the world?” In his telling, the ones who lead fruitful, sustainable careers are the ones who figure out how to leverage the attention they receive towards long-term fulfillment.

“That’s what sets Maya apart,” Hank concludes.