It's about love.

When Merlene Kincaid sits at a desk with a tiny four-year old girl reading aloud stories from a child's picture book, it is love.

"These little children need love," she said. "Some of them might not be getting enough out there in the world. Some don't have any. But when they're here, they have my love. I give them hugs; I listen to them."

Healing Children with Creativity at Child Center~Marygrove

Behind the brushstrokes, there are stories of violence, abuse, and neglect; there are stories of emotions that just couldn't be controlled; and stories of loneliness and anger.

But between the shaded lines of chalk, outside the precise etchings in pencil, amid the seemingly haphazard distribution of magazine images and tissue, you cannot see the stories. They are hidden somewhere deeper than the eye can penetrate.

Dawn Johnson knows. She knows their background and their struggles. She knows how the children have arrived at Child Center~Marygrove and how difficult their lives have been. But Dawn is not a therapist. She's an art teacher. She channels their pain, their hardships, and their emotions into something beautiful.

By John Nguyen

For Miguel, his cage was more than just the tiny spot he shared on the floor with twenty other men in the basement of a crumbling duplex. His cage was much larger. It was bigger than the four walls of the leaky, moldy duplex, where he was forced to stay. It was more massive than the city where he slaved every day over the tall weeds of highway shoulders. His cage was larger even then the state of Missouri, a foreign land whose lawns he tended. Miguel's cage was America. In the Land of Opportunity, Miguel was trapped in the underbelly of American industry: Human Trafficking.