Hope and opportunity are blossoming on the South Side of Chicago where a man and his wife have used flowers to help poor communities turn over a new leaf.
Running two nonprofits, Southside Blooms and Chicago Eco House, Quilen Blackwell and his wife Hannah Bonham are helping at-risk youth find opportunity while simultaneously cutting into the billions Americans spend every year importing cut flowers from the tropics.
Blackwell’s work earned him the CNN Hero of the Year Award at the 19th edition of the honor, organized by the cable news outlet with support from corporate sponsors. The award came with a $100,000 prize to support the Blackwell’s work.
Southside Blooms turns vacant lots on Chicago’s South Side into eco-friendly flower farms, employing local young people to grow, harvest, arrange, and sell flowers at his group’s nonprofit flower shop.
Why flowers? When Blackwell, a Wisconsin native, moved to Chicago to attend ministry school following a stint in the Peace Corps, he ended up in Englewood—that most notorious of burbs where some 40% of residents live in poverty.
An initial attempt at a social enterprise growing fruit and vegetables ran afoul of regulation, and came with challenges like dealing with toxins and metals in the soil while trying to secure purified water for irrigation. Back at the drawing board, Blackwell happened upon an eye-opening statistic: that more than 70% of cut flowers bought in the US are imported.
An example of how incredibly efficient the global economy can be, Blackwell believed that flowers might be the answer to reconnecting Englewood youth to nature, while simultaneously growing something meaningful in between boarded-up shops, condemned buildings, and empty lots.
“I said, ‘Wait a minute. Why are we importing flowers from other countries when we have all this land, all of this youth?” Blackwell narrated in an interview to CNN. “Maybe flowers are the answer.’”
By 2021, Chicago Eco House had already turned 6 vacant South Side lots into solar-powered farms, with the resulting flowers sold through Southside Blooms.
“This is my life,” Blackwell told Citizen Watch US at the time. “My wife is involved, my kids are involved, my wife Hannah is our lead florist. So after we harvest our flowers, they get processed at our flower shop and then we sell ’em all across the city.”
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“A lot of the most beautiful flowers we grow do very well in adverse conditions, and that’s just like the people here.”
Southside Blooms currently employs 25 young people, CNN reported, primarily between the ages of 16 and 25, and will open a second location on the city’s west side this spring.
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“As long as they’re getting all of the ingredients they need to be successful, there’s nothing that they can’t do,” he said. “Our young people are blossoming and blooming every single day.”
Like any great leader, what Blackwell was keen to communicate holding the CNN Hero Award in his arms, was the strength and character of his team: his wife, and the young men and women who make the project possible.
WATCH Blackwell in action below…
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