Co Authored by Rachael Butler and Adam Snell

Over the last couple years, our partners in China have asked City Hope to incorporate elements of emotional and relational care into our annual trips. Their request opened up a clear opportunity for City Church to offer our resources to our friends in China. Rachael Butler, a counselor at the City Church Counseling Center, developed projects for this trip designed specifically to meet the therapeutic needs at the Starfish Project. Based on her experience during a counseling-based service trip to Rwanda, Rachael introduced a series of art therapy activities for the women to explore their own story and how it fits into the Starfish community.

The miracle of the starfish is its ability to regenerate its own limbs after a traumatic loss–a fitting name for an organization which comes alongside women seeking to regenerate lost parts of their lives.The Starfish Project was founded in 2006 with a vision to reach exploited women in China with a holistic vision of care. The vision of the organization is to move into these women's lives to help them heal and grow by providing counseling, vocational training, language skills, health care access and shelter.

Months before departing to China, we brainstormed about what we could possibly offer to this organization. Looking around at our team, we saw business men and women, a mental health therapist, a photographer, a youth development program manager, and a host of able bodies and compassionate hearts. The team planned to use the unique gifts and talents of our team to come alongside the staff at Starfish in providing holistic care. We would be meeting with the ladies of Starfish throughout the week to provide business training, art therapy, and shelter beautification.

The Starfish Project's distinctive commitment to meeting the mental, spiritual and physical needs of the women aligns with City Hope's vision for renewal in San Francisco. Since manual labor is a City Church service trip rite of passage, we thought it appropriate to begin by loving the inside of their home—painting, dusting, degreasing—to surprise them upon return from their art therapy sessions.

Each year the director of holistic care asks us to provide a team training on professional development. Since many of the women are leaving unstable environments to live and work together, conflict management is essential and was our focus. We called upon our McKinsey consultant and New Door Ventures program manager to provide an organizational overview and tangible skill set around healthy conflict. The women's responses indicated that we hit on a hot topic as they engaged our team with question after question. Helping the women to see themselves each as an vital part of the whole starfish was a way to invite the women to begin to know their inner selves through individual artistic expression.

For three consecutive days, part of our team met with the ladies of Starfish at their work site to participate in art therapy. The women eagerly crowded around a long, black work table covered with art supplies and magazines and were invited to choose images to start to tell their stories through visual collages. At first, we could sense a general shyness and hesitancy in the room but slowly the women began to open up and created collages reflecting themes of struggle, loss, and trauma... dreams, hopes and fears. The art therapy provided a safe space for the women to go deeper with one another and share their stories with our team. With our final art project, we gave the women each a blank mask to decorate it to reflect something unique about themselves.

After a week of exploring inner worlds, we invited the women to a photo shoot in the famous art district where they work together. The faces of the women brightened up one-by-one as they were given the opportunity to express themselves through individual portrait sessions, some choosing to model their artistic masks. Our photographer, Mark, is passionate about awakening self-confidence through the medium of photography, a fitting therapeutic exercise to end our time with Starfish.

ALL Images by Mark Kuroda