People visit the Holocaust Museum Houston and ask themselves, “How could this have happened?” How did so many people sit silently while their neighbors were targeted, taunted and taken away?

Could it happen again?

The Butterfly Project’s goal is to make sure it does not. And it starts with you: When you see a wrong being done, it is your duty to right it. It is your duty to be an upstander. By having brave people standing up to bullying, intolerance, racism, inequality and negativity, The Butterfly Project is spurring a more positive online conversation. Join the community of people who refuse to be bystanders. 

More than 60,000 people have been a part of the Butterfly Project’s message online this year.
Now is your chance to get involved:

The Butterfly Project was inspired by a short poem from Pavel Friedman, just 21 years old and living in the Terezín concentration camp. He wrote about a fleeting butterfly that he no longer was able to see:

The Butterfly / Pavel Friedman

The last, the very last,
So richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow.
Perhaps if the sun's tears would sing
against a white stone. . . .

Such, such a yellow
Is carried lightly 'way up high.
It went away I'm sure because it wished to
kiss the world good­-bye.

For seven weeks I've lived in here,
Penned up inside this ghetto.
But I have found what I love here.
The dandelions call to me

And the white chestnut branches in the court.
Only I never saw another butterfly.

That butterfly was the last one.
Butterflies don't live in here,
in the ghetto.

Friedman died two years later when he was transported to Auschwitz in 1944 but his words have lived on and given hope to millions of people: The Butterfly Project has collected over 1.5 million handmade paper butterflies to inspire and remind people of all the beauty in the world.

Become part of the Butterfly Project. #StandWithHope