Lisa Stirrett’s Studio Powers a Movement Across Continents
PHOTOS COURTESY OF LISA STIRRETT
By QUINN PROPST
Ward Media Staff Reporter
Artist and entrepreneur Lisa Stirrett has always felt a calling to empower others—a passion that grew with her own children and has since blossomed into a global mission.
Through her nonprofit, Creative Warriors, and her studio The House of Glass in Silverdale, she is helping women in Burkina Faso, West Africa, build businesses, gain independence, and transform their communities.
The nonprofit Creative Warriors empowers women in Burkina Faso by providing no interest loans, business education and support. As each woman pays back her loan another woman is funded. The heart of the nonprofit is to raise women up to be the warriors they are for their families and their communities.
The average loan recipient has had limited access to education and often lives in a polygamous household with many children. She is typically responsible for providing her family with food, financial support, healthcare, and education.
Their culture considers them valueless but they have the weight of the world on their shoulders, Stirrett said.
Stirrett, who has a strong faith, wants to help them break those lies and build them up to know their true identity in Christ, she said.
Her desire to help empower people comes from her own experiences growing up and battling low self esteem. Through her life experiences and working on it Stirrett has learned how to tame those feelings and build up her self esteem. Though she knows it is something that requires continued work for everyone.
“I am more of a teacher type,” she said. “If I learn something that is helpful, I want to teach somebody else. Then you see somebody else that might be going through the same thing, and you just kind of lock arms and help them through it.”
Because the loans are paid back and passed on to the next woman, donations to Creative Warriors continue to generate impact long after they’re given. So far, the organization has helped more than 300 women.
Each woman attends a four-day business training session. The nonprofit’s local team helps the women develop a business plan, walks through every phase of their plan with them and continues to work with the women for two years after their loans are paid back. Creative Warriors has a %100 percent payback rate.
The nonprofit also runs a two-year, government-accredited tailoring program. During their schooling the women have an in-service program to make period pads for their community.
Graduates of the program can take a national test to run their own business, work for the government or provide tailoring services in their communities.
Creative Warriors has established a period pad program in five villages where they educate women on their bodies, health and the importance of their identity in Christ.
The nonprofit partners with Days for Girls to provide sex education, healthcare training, period pads, and underwear to women and girls who would otherwise not have access to those resources.
Days for Girls is an international nonprofit dedicated to breaking the stigma around menstruation and improving access to menstrual health solutions. The organization works to ensure that women and girls can stay in school, work, and participate fully in their communities. So far, it has reached more than 3.5 million women and girls worldwide with its educational programs and sustainable hygiene kits.
“Your cycle is very shameful in those communities, they’re shunned to their huts,” she said. “By giving them the ability to either stay in school or keep working it changes things.”
Creative Warriors has also established chicken farms, water pumps and gardens to help feed school children.
In her Silverdale Studio Stirrett also has a coffee shop, Holy Grounds, which is currently raising funds for a woman in Burkina Faso who wants to be a nurse. So far they have paid for her first year of schooling and are raising funds for her second year.
“A nurse over there is just like a doctor here,” Stirrett said. “There’s very few doctors, there’s nurses that do everything in all the different villages.”
But Agriculture is where Stirrett feels they can have the biggest impact. Stirrett has partnered with ECHO, a nonprofit that works with hungry families to teach small-scale, sustainable farming techniques. ECHO and Creative Warriors are working together to provide natural farming training in Burkina Faso—specifically in the capital, Ouagadougou, where ECHO has an impact center.
After initial training sessions, local women have already begun changing their farming methods, which had previously not been as effective. The group now oversees five plots of land, supplying fencing, water sources, and ongoing support through ECHO and local churches, which help manage the farms and assist the women.
Stirrett said the training is life changing.
“Our team, just from January, have switched over their planting, the way that they farm,” she said. “Now they have small parcels, maybe next to their church or their home. We just got back, and the food that they’re growing right now, it’s life changing. They’ll have enough to feed themselves and others.”
They will be able to sell the excess food and have money to buy meat and other needs that they may have, she said.
How it all began
Stirrett began her journey as an artist when she found out that she was pregnant with her first child. Looking for a way to work from home while raising her family, she started creating Gyotaku prints—a traditional Japanese art form that involves applying ink or paint to fish and pressing them onto paper to make detailed, natural impressions.
Stirrett began printing her fish on t-shirts and other textiles and selling them at festivals. Soon that evolved into selling her work at Nordstroms and eventually Epcott Center.
In 2000, while the Bremerton Ferry Terminal was under construction, a call went out for local artists to submit portfolios for consideration. Lisa Stirrett wanted to be part of the project, but at the time, she didn’t have a formal portfolio. Determined, she got to work—creating a body of art using her signature techniques on nautical charts and handmade papers. She submitted her new collection, applied for the opportunity, and was awarded the commission.
That project marked the beginning of a long relationship with the terminal. Since then, Stirrett has contributed to many other public art installations there, including murals, paintings, and even custom benches. It was the launchpad for her career in public art.
From that starting point, Stirrett then opened her first shop in Silverdale, which was her studio for six years.
Now her work can be found in both private and corporate collections and in public displays throughout the Pacific Northwest.
Stirrett found that her art career was a good fit with raising a family. It helped put her boys through school. One is now a doctor. When she didn’t need to help support her boys she began working with nonprofits to have her artwork benefit them.
In 2012, she bought the building at her current location on Silverdale Way and though it took a lot of work to renovate the space she knew it was the right place for her. In the new location she began hosting art walks. Each month she would have artists set up their booths in her studio and invite the community in.
“I featured a new nonprofit every month because I always thought, you know, we’ve got so many nonprofits, but a lot of people don’t know about them, and I do think we are a very giving community,” she said.
But Stirrett longed for something more. So, she prayed and asked if God had something specifically for her.
“Once I moved here, I literally was praying and I was like, ‘okay, God, do you have something for me’,” she said.
At the time she was on her way to help build a healthcare center in Burkina Faso with another organization.
“(In Burkina Faso) a woman came out of the bush, and the interpreters said, ‘there’s women here to see you’,” she said. “And I’m like, ‘me?’, so it was kind of a hair-raising moment.”
Stirrett asked the women what they needed.
“I came back from that trip and well the Lord gave me kind of a neat program where I could leverage the studio and the proceeds from the studio and relationships with the customers coming in, learning about these women and what their needs were,” she said.
Within days of the first contact Stirrett had several women who wanted to start their own businesses. Some women needed tools for farming, some needed a grain grinder to help with meal preparation in their community.
Without a grain grinder the women use a mortar and pestle to grind grain for making bread or other things for meals. They had to chop down their grain and then grind it by hand in order to make dinner each night.
“So the grinder would really be a huge benefit to the community,” she said.
Within three days she was able to fund those requests and that was the beginning of her nonprofit Creative Warriors.
“I went over there and I didn’t expect that to happen,” she said. “I came back and just really felt empowered myself to go help and empower these women and learn more about the culture.”
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