The Butterfly Project: A Global Migration of Connection
Written by the Team at Cerbelli Collective
There are art projects that live on walls, and there are art projects that move through people. The Butterfly Project exists somewhere in between.
Created by Callen Schaub, The Butterfly Project began not as a business model or campaign, but as a deeply personal act of remembrance. What started with a single butterfly created for a grieving daughter has since evolved into a global gifting initiative built around connection, healing, memory, and shared humanity.
Where It Began
The origin of the project traces back to a moment during Callen’s 100-day “Live at 5” stream, when he created a spin painting in the back of a rental car parked on the side of a highway. That painting was eventually purchased by a man in Germany.
A year later, the man unexpectedly passed away.
His seven-year-old daughter reached out to Callen with a simple request: could he create a butterfly to place on her father’s grave?
That single gesture became the beginning of something much larger. A moment where grief met color, and loss transformed into creation.
One butterfly became two.
Two became fifty.
Fifty became hundreds.
Today, the project has grown into Butterfly Project: Phase Three, an initiative centered around the creation and gifting of 3,000 individually handmade metal butterflies sent to people around the world. Each butterfly carries its own story. Each one is named by its recipient. None are for sale.
More Than an Art Project
At its core, The Butterfly Project is about gifting without expectation.
Every butterfly is hand-painted, resin-coated, documented, packaged, and mailed as a gesture of connection. Some represent grief. Others symbolize healing, transformation, remembrance, survival, hope, or love. Together, they form what the project calls “a kaleidoscope of hope.”
What makes the initiative resonate so deeply is that participation is not transactional. The butterflies are not products to purchase or collectibles to compete for. They are gifts shared freely across borders, communities, and personal stories.
In a time where so much of the digital world revolves around algorithms, performance, and consumption, The Butterfly Project offers something radically different: intentional human connection.
The Impact So Far
As the project continues to grow, stories from around the world continue to take flight alongside the butterflies themselves. Participants have shared experiences tied to grief, recovery, family, identity, transformation, and remembrance, creating a collective archive of deeply personal moments connected through art.
What began as a single act of compassion has now become a worldwide migration of stories.
The project also highlights the invisible labor behind generosity. From laser-cutting metal forms to painting, packaging, shipping, filming, and documenting each butterfly, every phase of the process is intentionally crafted to preserve the spirit of gifting while allowing the initiative to continue scaling globally.
How to Become Involved
There are several ways to participate in The Butterfly Project:
Submit your story through the project platform
Follow the ongoing butterfly releases online
Share the project and its message with others
Contribute financially to help support production and global shipping costs
Simply witness and engage with the stories being shared
Importantly, donating does not guarantee receiving a butterfly, and receiving a butterfly does not require a donation. The project intentionally keeps gifting and financial support separate in order to preserve the integrity of the initiative.
For those who wish to support the continuation of the project, contributions help fund materials, resin, packaging, worldwide postage, and documentation efforts that allow the butterflies to continue reaching people across the globe.
To learn more, participate in the project, or contribute to future releases, visit:
The Butterfly Project Phase Three
To directly support the continuation of the initiative through donations, visit:
Butterfly Project GoFundMe
Looking Ahead: The Next Release
The Butterfly Project continues to evolve in phases, with new butterfly releases unfolding as additional stories are collected and completed.
The latest butterfly release is now live, continuing the project’s ongoing migration of stories, connection, and shared humanity across the world.
Because sometimes the smallest objects carry the heaviest stories. And sometimes, a butterfly becomes far more than art.