A convening at the Cactus Café and a follow-up survey highlight the challenges and strengths of Austin’s music nonprofit ecosystem—and what it takes to sustain the people behind the sound.
by Andy Langer
This year marks the 35th anniversary of Austin’s adoption of “Live Music Capital of The World” as its official branding for identity and tourism. As someone who’s worked just as long as a journalist primarily focused on Austin music, I can tell you this city has spent far more time debating the merits of the slogan than celebrating the nonprofit ecosystem that helps sustain the people who make that music possible. Long before “creative economy” became policy shorthand, local non-profit organizations were already dealing with the realities of musician life: mental health, housing instability, financial precarity, access to care, and the need for community.
When people talk about Austin’s music nonprofits, the SIMS Foundation and HAAM (Health Alliance for Austin Musicians) usually come up first, and for good reason. SIMS, founded in the mid-1990s, became a national model for providing mental health and substance-use support to musicians and music workers. HAAM, launched a decade later, built a healthcare access model that cities across the country look to Austin as a model. I’ve been told many times—often at SXSW, usually by industry folks from elsewhere—that what Austin built with SIMS and HAAM simply doesn’t exist in most other cities.
Their impact goes beyond national recognition. For Austinites, SIMS and HAAM also served as proof of concept: that a community can see a need, organize around it, and build something durable that actually improves people’s lives. Their longevity helped establish both the expectation and the confidence that Austin’s music community could take care of its own, paving the way for other organizations to emerge.
That legacy helps explain the depth of the ecosystem that exists today. It includes groups helping aging musicians find stable housing and programs offering music education to underprivileged kids, alongside a range of quieter efforts that rarely attract national attention but help hold the scene together.
Last year, the Moritz Center convened more than a dozen Austin-based, music-focused nonprofits at the University of Texas at Austin’s Cactus Café. The goal wasn’t to unveil research or preview solutions. It was to listen. What are organizations seeing right now? Where is strain showing up? What still feels sustainable, and what doesn’t?
What emerged in that room wasn’t a single narrative, but a shared set of pressures.
Across organizations, leaders described rising demand paired with limited and often unstable resources. Mental health needs among musicians and music workers have intensified, while access to affordable, culturally responsive care remains uneven. Housing instability continues to shape who seeks help and how often. For many, the effects of the pandemic never really went away; they simply became part of the baseline.
Administrative burden surfaced quickly. Staff are stretched not only by direct service work, but by reporting requirements, compliance obligations, and the constant chase for funding. Given that most of the nonprofits in the room rely primarily on individual donors, a handful of Austin-based corporate philanthropies, and occasional fundraising events, the margin for administrative capacity is thin.
We also talked about grants and research opportunities that might provide more stable funding. Grants and research are central to the work of the Moritz Center, but many participants were candid about the barriers. Interest wasn’t the problem. Capacity was. Any path forward, people said, would need to account for personnel, education, and practical support without pulling organizations away from what they exist to do.
Just as striking as the challenges was the energy in the room once the conversation really got going. There was a palpable energy present from finally being together—many for the first time—without an agenda beyond sharing what was working and what wasn’t. Several said plainly they wanted more of this. The most consistent takeaway wasn’t about funding or programs. It was relief. People left feeling seen, supported, and less isolated in work that is often done quietly and under pressure.
A few weeks later, the Moritz Center circulated a survey to see whether what we heard in the room extended beyond it. Responses were shared directly with the Center, but the findings are presented here in aggregate, without attribution.
Across the survey, the same sentiment kept surfacing: we want to work together more. Shared referrals, joint programs, collective advocacy. Nobody was short on willingness. Capacity was the issue. Real collaboration takes time, coordination, and infrastructure, and those things are rarely funded.
Impact measurement and staff well-being often came up side by side. Everyone understands why funders want results, but many organizations talked about how difficult it can be to translate complex, human work into clean numbers without flattening it. At the same time, people were candid about their own burnout. Running small, mission-driven nonprofits often means carrying heavy emotional weight with limited staffing and very little room to step back. What they were asking for, plainly, were ways to do the work without adding more strain to teams that are already stretched thin.
If there was one issue everything kept circling back to, it was affordability. Housing, healthcare, mental health services, even the ability to stay in Austin at all. For musicians and music workers, these pressures show up early and often, and the nonprofits in this space absorb much of the downstream impact. When affordability breaks down, everything else gets harder.
For my colleagues at Moritz, much of this felt familiar. I know Austin music; they know social work. One of the first things I heard when I joined UT’s School of Social Work team is that, within social work, there’s a basic understanding that individual outcomes can’t be separated from the systems surrounding them. Many of the themes that surfaced—unmet basic needs, systems stretched past capacity, frontline workers carrying the weight of structural problems they didn’t create—are ones the field has been naming for decades. Housing instability shows up as mental health strain. Financial precarity shows up as burnout. Limited access to care shows up everywhere. None of this is theoretical. Hearing them emerge so clearly in a music-focused context made the connections hard to ignore.
That perspective helps clarify how Moritz can be useful without overstepping. We’re not here to replace community expertise or duplicate work that already exists. But we can support research and evaluation in ways that don’t pull people away from direct service, help translate lived experience into policy-relevant insight, and create more spaces like the one at the Cactus where organizations can share ideas and support one another without having to compete.
It’s also worth saying plainly: strengthening music nonprofits isn’t just about music. It’s about people, and about the conditions that allow communities to stay healthy, connected, and rooted in place.
We came away from this work with a clear takeaway. The challenges are real and structural, not the result of poor planning or lack of effort. And there is real strength here, especially when organizations are given the chance to come together, speak honestly, and realize they’re not carrying this alone.
If Austin wants its creative life to endure, it has to pay attention to the systems that support the people behind it. That work starts with listening, continues with collaboration, and benefits from a social work lens that doesn’t lose sight of the people doing the work or the people it’s for.
