Maya Higa: Bringing conservation closer to home
Maya Higa is a 23 year old twitch streamer, boasting 603k followers and yet her accomplishments spread significantly more than the digital space.
In February 2021, Maya founded Alveus Sanctuary, a non-profit animal sanctuary in Texas with the aims of utilising animal ambassadors as a tool for education. This all being documented through streams on her own twitch channel and also Alveus’ own twitch channel.
As of writing, she has raised $600,000 through twitch. Yet how does one woman in Texas make viewers all over the world passionate about the conservation of natural species?
Getting people to care
Maya started with her conservation cast, a podcast dedicated to connecting with scientists and conservationists to spread awareness about the difficulties facing natural species. As quoted on her conservation cast website:
“In the end we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.”
Baba Dioum
1968
This is a message Maya reiterates throughout all of her content, the only way progress can be made is through education. This is emphasised in her Animal Quest episodes where she pinpoints a species and explains the challenges facing it such as the pet trade or poaching.
Even if people cannot be swayed to care about the animals themselves Maya found other ways to utilise her following. She set donation goals for the initial setup of Alveus with the top goal at $500,000 being for her to shave her head. The lower goals also involved her friends such as $10,000 for a whipped cream pie to fellow influencer Slick’s face
Therefore even if her viewers interests only lie within internet culture and influencers, they were still incentivised to donate.
The more cynical may say part of Maya’s charm is her ‘girl next door’ feeling that makes it easy for viewers to create a parasocial relationship with her. This could mean that viewers are motivated to donate because it almost feels like donating to a friends charity cause and that in her podcasts and streams she is speaking to you personally rather than thousands of people. These parasocial relationships fostered by influencers (whether intentionally or unintentionally) do have a persuasive effect on the viewers which could absolutely be used for less noble causes than here for conservation.
However, regardless of why or how Maya makes viewers care about the natural world and our effect on it, it is undeniable the positive impact she is making throughout the digital space. It is impossible to measure how far the ripples of her influence will go but having made so much progress in such little time, it is impossible to not be excited about all the things to come.
