Renewed and Remade
Thistle Farms, a social enterprise based in Nashville, employs and empowers women survivors of prostitution.
IT’S FITTING WHEN the Rev. Becca Stevens, a Nashville-based Episcopal priest who has devoted the last two decades to helping women make their way off the street, answers the phone with, “Can you hold on one minute while I hug one person?” Despite her increasingly busy schedule, Stevens still makes time to slow down and pause for a simple, compassionate connection with others.
Thistle Farms’ founder, the Rev. Becca Stevens
Photo by Canterbury UMC
Founded in 1997, Thistle Farms employs an innovative business model to support women survivors of trafficking, prostitution and addiction, and give them a second chance at life. Thistle Farms’ two-year residential program provides free housing, food, health care, therapy, education, and “sisterhood,” all funded through the sale of high-quality, organic bath and body products made by the women survivors. A business selling soothing, healing body care products while providing jobs and a living wage to women survivors—whose bodies have been used and abused—made perfect sense to Stevens.
Since its inception, Thistle Farms has provided more than 105,000 hours of employment, resulting in over $1.6 million in income for women survivors. At least 1,200 women artisans are currently supported through fair wage programming and development set up by the organization’s global partnerships.
“What makes us successful is, we are a mission with a business and not a business with a mission,” she said. The business was a way to serve more survivors.
The inspiration to dive into social entrepreneurship simply sprang up from necessity, Stevens said. Thistle Farms needed financial support and a substantive way to get women up on their feet, which required income generation.
Her calling to help women survivors “came from personal experience and brokenness,” Stevens said. “I had so much compassion for these women. What I learned later is the women of Thistle Farms carried a similar story.”
“Just through our soap, we can build houses—we can change people’s lives. It’s the most important soap in the world.”
REV. BECCA STEVENS
Stevens herself is a survivor of childhood trauma. After her father’s sudden death at the age of five, the pastor at her family’s church began to sexually molest her. The abuse went on for years. That experience gave her an acute level of empathy for the women who come to Thistle Farms, many of whom also carry deep emotional wounds. Despite the fact that the abuse occurred in a worship space—a space that was supposed to be safe—she did not turn away from the church.
“There was some messed-up stuff in my life, but I always felt God’s love with me,” she said, adding that she experienced both good and bad within the same church. There was the abuse she survived, but also the women’s group her mom was a part of, a group of women who she said ultimately “saved me.”
“I knew the dysfunctional, but I also knew the beautiful side,” she said. “So I knew that those co-existed. I knew there was a side (of the church) where everyone was welcome, where there was no judgment and shame.”
Look at a map of Thistle Farms’ sister programs, and it covers just about the entire United States, with locations from New Orleans to St. Louis, California to New York. At least 50 organizations throughout the country have programs based on Thistle Farms’ model of recovery. Thistle Farms has also formed more than 30 international partnerships with organizations from 20 countries around the world.
The expansion has been necessary because the need is simply so great. In Nashville alone, there are more than 100 women on the Thistle Farms waiting list.
“We hold a circle every week where we light a candle for the women still on the streets. The women trying to find a way home. You hear horrific stories—about women who have been dumped in a canyon, who have overcome being shot by pimps,” she said. “But you also hear so much joy and laughter. There’s this misconception that (the work of Thistle Farms) is this hard, horrible work, and the truth is it’s really joyful.”
The name Thistle Farms carries with it a symbolic significance: Thistle is a weed but also a flower, depending on how you view the plant. It is prickly but beautiful, and it flourishes even in rough terrain. And its roots run deep.
A 2007 graduate of the Thistle Farms residential program, Shelia McClain is now director of education and outreach for the national network.
When Shelia came into the Thistle Farms recovery program in late 2004, she was using hard drugs, selling her body on the streets, enduring relentless abuse at the hands of her pimp, and moving in and out of jail. It was a long road getting to a place where she was even able to come to Thistle Farms, even though she had been aware of the program and interested in getting clean for months.
Five months into the program, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. “That was the aha moment for me,” she said. “That’s when I had to make a decision, choose to live or to die.”
“I’m going to break the cycle of generation after generation of sexual abuse and addiction. I’m breaking that for my children.”
SHELIA MCCLAIN
She chose to live and stayed on at Thistle Farms while going through chemotherapy and radiation treatment. The women she worked with at Thistle Farms “gave me a different perspective,” Shelia said. “They taught me how to be a friend, how to be a daughter. They taught me to have morals and values, gave me second and third chances.”
While there, she met her husband, and they got married. Both addicts in recovery, they both have 15 years clean. About four or five months after her radiation was finished, Shelia found out that she was pregnant. “It was a blessing because when you go through chemo, it usually messes things up. But God had a plan for me, and I’m so glad that I didn’t have children in active addiction,” she said.
Shelia and her husband, Randy, have been married for 13 years and are raising two children, a 12-year-old boy Shelia calls her “miracle baby” and a 10-year-old girl.
Photo Above and Lead Photo by Erica Baker
“When people hear cancer, it’s like ‘oh my god, I’m so sorry.’ For me, that was the greatest blessing in my life,” she said. “When I was going through chemotherapy, I was completely bald. I literally have a road map on my head because of all the abuse I survived out there. I used to get beat a lot, and we didn’t get to go to the hospital. So I think seeing what I had survived made an impact.”
McClain’s inspiring journey caught the attention of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nicholas Kristof, who wrote about her and about Thistle Farms in a 2013 New York Times column (she was then going by Shelia Faye Simpkins) and then again in 2019.
“The notion that the sex industry is a playground of freely consenting adults who find pleasure in their work is delusional self-flattery by johns,” Kristof wrote in the 2013 piece.
That kind of Pretty Woman mythology about the “fun side” of prostitution is a pervasive misconception. “People still think women choose. And all I really want to say about that, to anybody that will listen, is—when people choose the life of the street, what are their options?” Stevens said.
After graduating from Thistle Farms, Shelia earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology and is currently studying for a Master of Social Work at the University of Tennessee, Nashville. She helped to create a program for women in prison called Magdalene on the Inside. Through that program, women can begin counseling while they’re serving their time, and once they’re up for parole, they enter the two-year Magdalene program.
Working through her trauma and helping others, Shelia said, “took a weight off of me that I can’t even explain. I was really able to start dreaming again. And start planning what my life would look like moving forward.”
“Everything I do now, I do because I need to be an example to my children,” she said. “I’m going to break the cycle of generation after generation of sexual abuse and addiction. I’m breaking that for my children… They were blessed enough to be born after I got my life together, so this is the one thing in my life that I get to do right.”
The Kristof piece in the New York Times propelled Stevens and Thistle Farms into an even brighter national spotlight and allowed for their business to keep growing.
Stevens has since been featured on ABC World News, NPR, and in a PBS documentary called A Path Appears. She was named a 2016 CNN Hero, a White House “Champion of Change,” and humanitarian of the year by the Small Business Council of America. She has also been inducted into the Tennessee Women’s Hall of Fame.
As Thistle Farms continues to grow and gain traction for its work, Stevens said, the motivation remains the same: It’s “what the Gospel says to do. I believe in my whole heart that we are not called to change the world. We are called to love it.”
“I do have an entrepreneurial heart, and I wish more faith leaders and pastors did engage the marketplace in a more powerful way,” she added. “Just through our soap, we can build houses—we can change people’s lives. It’s the most important soap in the world. Buying our soap can be a powerful prayer.”
When it comes to faith organizations, Stevens believes that churches are often not “creative enough in our justice work,” even though that capacity clearly exists in other areas—from creative writing to theological breakthroughs. “Entrepreneurship is about creativity,” she said. “But when it gets to justice, it’s just the same old, same old.”
“One of the worst things about faith is when people feel numbness and cynicism. Those are some of the hardest things that people of faith can bear,” she said. But at Thistle Farms, that’s never a worry.
“We don’t have to deal with that. We know our lives have meaning.”
