Maya Higa Rebuilt the Animal Sanctuary Around Creators.

At TED2026, Maya Higa gave an official TED Talk on Alveus Sanctuary, the wildlife nonprofit and educational sanctuary she built through livestreaming and creator-native media.

TED described it as “the wildlife sanctuary you can visit from anywhere.”

The project reaches millions educationally and has raised $7.5 million by rethinking the traditional zoo model through internet distribution.

Traditional zoos were built around physical attendance. Parking lots. Gift shops. Foot traffic. The institution depended on bringing people physically through the gate every single day.

Alveus disrupted the structure entirely.

The audience arrives exclusively online, tuning into Maya Higa’s livestreams or 24/7 feeds of her many animal “ambassadors.”

The livestream creates distribution. The distribution funds the sanctuary. The sanctuary strengthens education. The education builds the audience relationship.

This logic holds all the way through. The digital-first format prevents excessive human disruption and allows Alveus to allocate more resources to the animals instead of the visitor infrastructure traditional zoos depend on. Alveus also achieves greater educational reach than any regional zoo could physically accommodate.

The internet did much more than market the sanctuary this time. It changed how an entire sanctuary can function.

For Maya, livestreaming was never the goal. She started as a wildlife educator, and the internet simply became the most effective educational tool the work had ever seen.

Alveus has continued growing steadily for the past six years.

A creator business built around a trend has nowhere to go once that trend passes. A creator business built around a mission can keep expanding because the underlying reason for it existing doesn’t change when the platform does.

Alveus doesn’t exist just to justify the content. The content only exists because the sanctuary does. The audience latches on to the work because it amounts to something bigger than attention itself.

In an industry where the audience decides what’s valuable and what isn’t, the winning idea may be building something meaningful enough that visibility simply helps it grow.