August 7, 2025
We’re bringing not one, not two, but three powerful sessions to SXSW 2026—and we need your support to get there! These sessions are rooted in community, care, and courageous innovation. They reflect the real needs of educators, professionals, and young people.
These sessions are rooted in community, care, and courageous innovation.
SXSW is an essential destination for global professionals. The annual March conference event features sessions, music and comedy showcases, film and television screenings, world-class exhibitions, professional development and networking opportunities, tech competitions, awards ceremonies, and much more. SXSW proves that the most unexpected discoveries happen when diverse topics and people come together.
Voting is open now! If you believe in equity, wellness, and reimagining the future of sex ed and innovation, cast your vote and help us take the stage in 2026.
From Burnout to Balance: Wellness Tools for Educators
People who support youth are on the front lines of trauma—helping young people through grief, crisis, and injustice, often with little support themselves. When workplace cultures overlook this, they risk perpetuating harm. What if staff care weren’t an afterthought, but a leadership priority? This interactive session invites leaders to rethink trauma-informed care and explore concrete, feasible ways to embed staff well-being into daily practice—without adding workloads. We will also offer simple wellness tools to move educators from burnout to balance.
- Takeaway 1: Shift your understanding of trauma-informed approaches to include not just youth, but the educators and professionals who support them.
- Takeaway 2: Discover creative ways to weave grounding and collective care into everyday routines—helping teams pause, reflect, and recharge in real time.
- Takeaway 3: Explore ways to embed staff care, emotional safety, and trauma responsiveness into everyday practices, policies, and organizational culture.
Innovation Lives Everywhere: Rethinking Who Gets to Innovate
Innovation isn’t just for Silicon Valley or tech bros—it’s already thriving in community centers, youth programs, and lived experiences. This session will equip everyday leaders with the tools to innovate and the power to remove systemic barriers that block historically excluded communities. Together, we’ll unpack how practitioners can either open doors—or unintentionally block them—for communities of color, neurodivergent individuals, and those impacted by systemic inequities. Through an interactive workshop, participants will gain practical, people-first strategies that anyone can adopt and lead—especially those whose lived experiences are often overlooked but urgently needed.
- Takeaway 1: Learn practical tools to build innovation mindsets—no design degree or tech background required.
- Takeaway 2: Understand how to recognize and remove barriers that keep historically excluded communities from leading innovation.
- Takeaway 3: Techniques to leverage lived experience and community insights as powerful drivers of effective, authentic solutions to complex problems.
Beyond Risk: The New Story of Sex Ed
For decades, sex ed focused on what to prevent: teen pregnancy, infections—even risk-taking itself. Regardless of intent, this framing left too many feeling shamed, unseen, and unsupported. Today, advocates are reshaping the narrative, centering pride, pleasure, and power in health and well-being. They are affirming every young person’s right to make decisions about their bodies, relationships, and futures—including if, when, and how to parent (or not). In the wake of book bans and backsliding, we’ll glimpse a sex ed that’s healing. Come and gaze upon a world that’s just within reach.
- Takeaway 1: Fear-based health messaging is repression, not protection—part of the same harmful, failed playbook as book bans, censorship, and culture war politics.
- Takeaway 2: Education must include sex ed. Done right, it affirms as it informs, helping us build relationships, set boundaries, question media and seek care.
- Takeaway 3: This matters for all of us. When we change how we tell stories about sex and relationships, we bring forth a more just, free and equitable world.
Ready to vote?
Head to panelpicker.sxsw.com to vote for all three sessions and hopefully see us on the SXSW 2026 stage!
Community voting closes August 24, 2025—so don’t wait!
