#starfish project

Starfish Project: Jewelry Rooted in Hope and Style

By Vivian Drury While looking for the perfect outfit for UP’s fall issue party, I asked my mom for some advice on where to find a big statement piece necklace. She told me about Starfish Project, which takes Asian prostitute women off the streets and provides them with shelter, while teaching them to make jewelry to bring them back a sense of self work and a hopeful future. I couldn’t help but be…

This Career Realities interview is with Matt Callard, who is a mentor at speech therapy group the Starfish Project. Since attending the project for his own stammering eight years ago Matt discovered a passion for speaking and advocating for the project and speech therapy. In the interview he talks about his criteria for finding both paid and unpaid work (and how pay is not the important factor), about how people are much more approachable regarding unpaid work than you think, and how trying out ten jobs unpaid for a day is much better than trying out one job paid for six months.

Of particular interest was Matt talking about how the fulfillment you take from work is also down to the frequency with which you do it – that even work that you love pales in enjoyment if you begin to do that work repeatedly, day after day. Although Matt was not talking about artists here, this feels particularly relevant to artists: how you might strive to get paid for the particular art that you enjoy, but once you come to do it as a paid job, it becomes just that, a paid job, and the pleasure from it disappears. (It’s something I’ve had a problem with in keeping this website, and this podcast. I haven’t found the answer.)

(More about Career Realities interviews here.)

From the podcast:

On asking yourself the question ‘what do I like to do?’

“My dream is to travel to China"

339 | Sihanoukville, Cambodia

A story from Meng about simple dreams.

“My dream is to travel to China. I saw it on the TV once and I thought it looked so great, I would really love to go."

Meet a Stranger a day - 365docobites.com 365 documentaries in 365 days - Strangers' short and shorter stories

Big thanks to the folks at intrepidtravel.com for making this docobite possible.

Partnering with Starfish Project for Our Women’s Empowerment Mission

In addition to showcasing and revealing China’s best teas and tea traditions, Tranquil Tuesdays’ founding mission was to create a social enterprise that is a platform for training and employing disadvantaged Chinese women.

We don’t get a chance to discuss the whole social enterprise dimension of Tranquil Tuesdays as much as I would like to (there is so much to share about Chinese tea itself), but it is the whole reason I started Tranquil Tuesdays and a mission we have been committed to since our first day. 

You can read more about why I started Tranquil Tuesdays with a social enterprise mission in this interview I did with Mochi Magazine.

Our Commitment to Disadvantaged Women

Just as tea slowly reveals its inherent qualities as it steeps, Tranquil Tuesdays believes that providing Chinese women from disadvantaged backgrounds with steady employment, vocational and life skills training, and a network of support will encourage them to discover their full and abundant potential.

Tranquil Tuesdays partners with Chinese NGOs and social enterprises to hire, train, and support disadvantaged local women.

So it is with great pleasure today that I share more about our partnership with Starfish Project a social enterprise committed to “restoring hope to exploited women”--a social enterprise that shares a similar vision of women's empowerment who we admire deeply. 

Introducing one of our Partners: Starfish Project

In 2006, Starfish Project developed a socially responsible jewelry business in order to provide women who felt trapped in exploitative situations with alternative employment and a range of holistic care services.

Starfish Project provides opportunities for women to heal and grow through counseling, vocational training, language acquisition, family education grants and health care access, as well as providing housing in their women’s shelter.  You can read more about their work here. 

Working Together with Starfish Project to Support Women

After a woman has completed Starfish’s program and is ready to look for her first new job, Starfish Project’s team members will refer her for a job interview at Tranquil Tuesdays.   One of Tranquil Tuesday’s newest team members, Ouyang, is someone we met and hired on referral from Starfish.

In addition to working together to provide more opportunities and solutions for disadvantaged or exploited Chinese women, Tranquil Tuesdays and Starfish have even worked together creatively!

Tranquil Tuesdays and Starfish’s joint photoshoot

We collaborated creatively on Starfish’s recent photo shoot for their new catalog and website (some finished and behind-the-scenes photos featured above). 

The Starfish team camped out at Tranquil Tuesdays’ hutong office and showroom for a day long photo shoot in Beijing’s historical hutongs (hair and make-up outside in the hutongs anyone?). 

Together, we created some photos that showcased Tranquil Tuesdays tea and teaware collections alongside Starfish’s jewelry. 

Look at the main photo for the “Advocates of Hope” section of Starfish Project’s website (or see the screenshot of the website above).  Do you recognize that cup? Yup, that is our best-selling Celadon Hand-Pinched Cup (and those are also my hands in my debut as a hand model). 

Main photo for the “Blog” section of their website? Starfish model looking out the door of Tranquil Tuesday’s hutong office and showroom holding a celadon tea cup.

It is a such a privilege and pleasure for Tranquil Tuesdays to work together with a like-minded organization like Starfish Project that is similarly dedicated to empowering women in China and we hope you support them too!

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This Saturday we visited an organization called the Starfish Project as part of our Social Problems and Service Learning field trip. They are a great grassroots organization making a difference in the lives of exploited women in the city. This is a major problem here and all over the country, although very few people know about it and there are not many efforts being made to fix it. The women from the Starfish Project form relationships with women who are working as prostitutes in the shops and work to get them out of their situation. They help them access healthcare, education, alternative employment, and they have a shelter where the girls can stay. Listening to the stories from the director about the girls and all the terrible things they have had to go through was heart wrenching and how much this small organization has impacted their lives was just amazing.