The Paper Crane Peace Project
A paper crane is a wishfor someone you'll never meet.
Write your message, make a crane, and send it to Aurora. We weave it into a wreath and carry it to a community in the hardest days they have known. People in 47 countries have done it — there is no deadline and no minimum.
Why cranes
It started with a thousand paper cranes.
After July 20, messages of love and support began arriving in Aurora from communities across the country. Then a package came from O'Fallon, Missouri. One thousand paper cranes.
A boy there had started it. He set up at a local Starbucks and asked people passing through to write a message — hope, peace, encouragement, whatever they had — on a piece of paper. Those pieces of paper were then folded into cranes for a city most of them would never see.
One by one, strangers stopped to write. One by one, those messages became cranes. Eventually a thousand small acts of compassion made their way here.
A thousand is not an arbitrary number. In Japanese tradition, folding a thousand cranes — senbazuru — carries a wish: for hope, for healing, for peace. Sending them is how you say it without saying it.
Those cranes showed us what it feels like to be held by people you have never met. They became part of the inspiration for the sculpture that now stands in the Water-Wise Garden and, years later, for this project. We know what it means to receive that kind of compassion, because we experienced it ourselves.
Which is why none of this is hard on purpose. Most of those thousand people only wrote a sentence. It was never the craftsmanship that mattered — it was that someone stopped.
Five ways to take part
From one crane in an envelope to a Crane Box where you work.
About 15 minutes · anywhere
Make one crane
Write a message, make a crane, mail it to Aurora. One is enough. So is a hundred. You don't need to be good at it — nobody's first one is neat.
Show me how →Saturdays · Aurora
Come to Milly's
11 AM – 1 PM at Milly's Community Café. We'll teach you. Come once or come often — both are the same kind of welcome.
Join a Saturday →An afternoon · your town
Gather your own people
A classroom, a break room, a book club, a church basement. Anywhere people already sit down together. Tell us you're doing it and we'll help you start.
I want to host one →Ongoing · where you work or gather
Host a Crane Box
A box in a break room, a lobby, a library — anywhere people pass through with a minute to spare. They make a crane, drop it in, and when the box is full, you send it to Aurora. One workplace is already doing this.
Start one where you are →Any amount · from anywhere
Help with postage
The cranes arrive free. Weaving them into a wreath and getting it across the country — or the ocean — is the part that costs money.
Help us send them →What the cranes have done
Every wreath is made by hand, by people who will never meet the community that receives it — and arrives in the days when almost nothing else helps.
Never folded a paper crane? Most of us hadn't either.
No experience, no cost, no rush. Children do this. People do it one-handed. Take as many tries as you need.
Any square will do. 6″ × 6″ is the easiest to start with.
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Leave a message
A word, a name, a wish. Write it on the wing and it becomes part of the finished wreath, visible for someone else to find. Or write it before you fold, and your words end up inside the crane — folded in, carried the whole way. People have written love in 47 languages.
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Make your crane
Follow along at whatever speed suits you. Your first one will be lopsided, and it will be woven into a wreath alongside everyone else's exactly the same way.
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Mail it to Aurora
Send one, or send a hundred. We accept cranes year-round and weave them into wreaths as communities need them.
7/20 Memorial Foundation
15151 E. Alameda Pkwy
Aurora, CO 80012
Love in motion
Where the cranes have flown
Every point is a wreath that left Aurora and arrived somewhere in the hardest days a community has known. The map updates as new wreaths are sent.
What a wreath actually costs
Cranes arrive here by the thousand, made and mailed by people who ask for nothing. Everything after that has a price: paper for the Peace Box and the museum, the materials to weave a wreath, and postage to wherever it is needed next.
Keeps paper and supplies stocked at the Peace Box and the Aurora History Museum, so anyone who shows up can take part.
Sends one finished wreath to a community in the aftermath of tragedy — woven, packed, shipped, and delivered.
100% of every gift goes to the mission — Zeffy covers the processing fees.
And if money isn't what you have right now, a single crane in an envelope helps just as much.