Welcome to this bonus podcast of sound opinions. I'm Jim De Orgatus. My co-host over there is Greg

Cott and today we are really excited to have back our contributor Althea Legosby.

Althea, welcome back to sound opinions. Thank you. So you talk to Alejandro Escavado about the Sims Foundation.

Tell us about, well first of all, tell us what those initials are, S-I-M-S and what they are doing.

So it stands actually for a person who passed away, which Alejandro will tell us about in a little bit.

By the way, he was just named 2021 Austin City Limits Hall of Fame and

ducty alongside Lucinda Williams and Wilco.

Well, I think everybody on sound opinions is a big Alejandro Escavito fan.

Yeah, well so he co-founded Sims Foundation in 1995.

It's a nonprofit that subsidizes mental health and substance abuse recovery services for musicians.

But what makes it to me pretty special is that it also subsidizes for the dependence of those musicians and also for the music community as a whole in

Austin. So it's not just musicians but people in the industry it could be people

working at a venue and so on and so forth.

So this is a lot more expansive than some of the other not-for-profits out there.

Because health care in the music world, whether you're a sound person or a musician or a spouse I mean it's just you know they

don't have access to great health care especially not when it comes to mental health or substance abuse issues.

Exactly.

So they're expanding into other regions now in the wake of the pandemic and they launched this summer long founders challenge initiative to help raise

awareness for the foundation's work and they're expanding their services to

more musicians nationwide. Alejandro and I talked about how the foundation came to be.

Well, the Founders Challenge was inspired by Sims Ellison's father.

And for those who don't know who Simzillison was, he was a beautiful young bass player in a band called Pariah in the 90s here in Austin.

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