The Color of Hope: BJM New Horizons

By Julia Pferdehirt

Colors are more than just colors. Red signals alarm, while green signals growth and life. Grey can communicate sadness or depression. But what is the color of hope?

A few years ago at BJM’s women’s center, a group gathered every Thursday morning for Art for the Heart. Together, we’d use art to explore and understand our lives and experiences.

The leader explained our assignment for the day: we were going to paint our feelings. Choosing two colors and shapes born out of our imaginations, we painted the color and shape of sadness, anger, joy, and hope. Many of the women laughed. “Feelings have a color?” But they were willing to try, and I wondered what we all would create.

Women gathered their paper, paints and coffee cups and separated around the room. Unique works emerged. In the living room, one woman painted sadness as a rainfall of tears, grey and black. At the dining table, another painted a garden of green and orange leaf shapes to show joy.

About half an hour later, we refilled coffee and gathered again in the art room. Each woman turned her painting to the center so everyone could see what we had done for hope.

“Are we reading each other’s minds?” Jeneva joked.

“We all did the same thing!” Lisa said.

And they were right. We all, separately and together, had chosen two colors: a deep, rich cobalt blue and a sun-golden yellow.

“The blue is like the sky. Alive,” said Jeneva.

“And the gold,” added Lisa. “To me, that’s hope.”

Around the table, everyone nodded and smiled.

Our shapes were beautiful—and similar to one another’s, too. Bursts of yellow-gold, like the sun’s rays or fireworks expanding in the air.

“So, that’s what hope looks like,” someone said.

I’d forgotten about this wonderful morning at The Well until our operations team unveiled the graphics for New Horizons, our first gathering since the pandemic began. But there it was again: the color and shape of hope bursting, exploding sun-golden yellow. Of course this was the image that had emerged all those years ago, and re-emerged in this season as we step into our new horizon, filled with hope for all that God is doing in, for, and through women and girls.

If you’d like to invest in brighter futures, in hope, and in the women and girls of San Francisco, visit bjm-newhorizons.funraise.org.