When thinking of South by Southwest (SXSW), many automatically think of the music or technology prominently advertised to the public, but there is more to SXSW than its entertainment value. Beneath its showcases is a platform for nonprofit organizations and social causes to inspire meaningful change.
SXSW, held annually every March, is a festival for showcasing new media, music, and tech. It highlights many nonprofit organizations whose goal is to raise awareness and educate the public about their important causes.
Primarily Primates is an animal sanctuary located outside of San Antonio that rescues abused and abandoned animals from the pet trade, the entertainment industry, and laboratories. Nicole Benson, a volunteer and advocate at Primarily Primates, provides animals with a safe home for the rest of their lives in an effort to make up for some of the abuse they have experienced from humans.
“[The animals] are placed within our care so we can help them recover and have a good life for whatever years that they have left,” Benson said. “And so we usually acquire at least a couple of animals every single year. Unfortunately, we have had to turn down animals. We just can’t save them all. We just don’t have enough space or enough resources, but we take as many as possible.”
Primarily Primates’ goal coming into SXSW was to educate people on pet ownership and to protect animals from bad habitats. According to Bendson, very few people know about their sanctuary because it is not open to the public to protect the animals from continued exploitation by humans.
“Our biggest impact we’re hoping for is to educate people on the perils of primate pet ownership and encourage people to support organizations that do not use animal testing,” Benson said. “We would like to eventually be able to go out of business because there are no other animals that need us, but we will be here for as long as we can, as long as there are animals out there that are in trouble.”
With a shared goal of educating the public, the Human Rights Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting and protecting human rights globally in authoritarian regimes, is raising awareness on the dangers of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) with the CBDC Tracker. According to Zac Guignard, author of the Human Rights Foundation’s Financial Freedom Report, CBDCs are problematic because the banks are controlled by governments, which he believes could prohibit your freedom.
“The problem is when you live under a dictatorship, you can’t bank with your government without them being able to surveil all of your financial activity, freeze your funds, set expiration dates on your savings, impose bad interest rates …,” Guignard said. “People in that country wake up, and their savings could be worth half the amount than it was the night before because of a dictator devaluing a currency overnight.”
The Human Rights Foundation is focused not only on digital currencies, such as CBDCs, but also with helping other organizations that support human rights. By educating and supporting these organizations and the people within them, their goal is to push back against governmental control of financial systems and create more economic freedom.
“We have a development fund, so we give grants, in service of open source projects, to people building freedom tools for people living under dictatorships,” Guignard said. “We also have a nonprofit webinar, so we help nonprofits. We help onboard them onto decentralized and open-source money instead so that they can push back against the authoritarian regimes they’re living under.”
Another human rights nonprofit at SXSW is the Bail Project, whose goal is to help people in minority groups who can’t afford bail to get the bail money they need. Shannon Soper, the director of creative and marketing, explained that the Bail Project’s goal is to create a revolving bail: using the bail returned from previous bails to fund future bails.
“Once clients go back to court, we get 100% of that bail back,” Soper said. “Then we use that to help bail out the next person, so we call it a revolving bail. At the same time, we’re working to change policy and services. We’re working to pass bail reform across the country to ensure that justice isn’t based on clients making bail.”
Even though the Bail Project has already bailed out over 32,000 people across the country, their mission is not only to bail out people, but also to pass bail reform laws, which is another reason why they were at SXSW. Their presence in Texas highlights their efforts to fight proposed legislation that would make getting out of jail pretrial more difficult.
“Part of the reason why we’re in Texas is that they’re trying to pass two regressive bills that we’re trying to stop from going through,” Soper said. “Those bills would expand pretrial detention, make it harder for people to get out of jail pretrial. These are going against the people who are pursuing the legal system properly.”
The nonprofit organizations at SXSW were especially drawn to the festival’s large and engaged audience, which is passionate about innovation and making an impact. Many organizations saw it as a unique opportunity to connect with people who are interested in creating a better future. If you are interested in supporting or learning more about any of these nonprofit organizations, visit primarilyprimates.org, bailproject.org, and hrf.org for more information.
“SXSW does have the impact of a million, and has a lot of really engaged people who are interested in causes and the arts,” Soper said. “We work with a lot of influencers and people from tech, so we found that the people here are very engaged, very interested in the problem.”
