Donor Prospectus
Southside Blooms is a social enterprise project of the Chicago Eco House, a 501c3 nonprofit,
with the mission of using sustainability to alleviate inner city poverty.
Chicago (like other major urban areas throughout the United States) has problems with thousands of vacant lots, high poverty and unemployment among African American young people, and persistent gang violence. We solve this problem by converting these vacant lots into solar powered flower farms with rainwater irrigation systems that create jobs for young people in their home neighborhoods. Southside Blooms is the in-house flower shop where we turn our flowers into beautiful, handcrafted bouquets that are sold direct to consumer.
We are the living embodiment of the triple bottom line: economically sustainable, environmentally friendly, and socially responsible.
President and Founder Quilen Blackwell
Location Chicago, IL
Legal Structure 501c3 Nonprofit
Farms 4 (about an acre of growing space)
After school Program Participants 70
Workforce Development Program Participants 10
The Chicago Eco House was birthed in 2014, but our story started way before then. Our president and founder, Quilen Blackwell, is the grandson (through his mother’s side) of sharecroppers from Arkansas who moved to Milwaukee to secure a factory job as part of the Great Migration. His father grew up in the inner city of Milwaukee during the immediate aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement when racial tensions around forced integration through busing policies were high.
His parents moved to Madison, Wisconsin soon after they were married in the hopes that they could raise their children in a more stable situation then they experienced in Milwaukee. As a result, Quilen grew up in an ideal setting where he was given every opportunity to excel as he benefited from being a part of a prosperous dual income family, and he took full advantage of these opportunities as he earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and became a United States Peace Corps Volunteer in Thailand.
Blackwell taking Englewood students on a college tour of Loyola College
Blackwell in the Peace Corps
When Quilen returned home after finishing his Peace Corps service, he began looking for his niche as he transitioned back to American life. Ultimately, this led him to enrolling in ministry school at a small Christian school in the western suburbs of Chicago. Being in ministry school inspired him to commit to community service in Chicago, which led him to tutoring at a high school in the South Side of Chicago neighborhood of Englewood. Through this experience, he encountered the challenges of hard core inner city poverty and how it directly affects the young people who live there. In Englewood, there are hundreds of vacant and blighted properties and the unemployment rate is 22 percent and the poverty rate is 44 percent. Furthermore, the unemployment rate among black youth ages 16-24 is 50 percent. It became obvious that developing a new economic solution to stem some of these economic problems was a huge need in the community.
Given the severity of the situation, Quilen felt like he had a choice to make: either ignore the pain he saw firsthand or dedicate his life to helping these young people. Given how fortunate he was to have a grandfather and parents make choices that allowed for him to avoid the trauma that many black people experience, he felt a sense of duty (particularly as a Christian) to go to the inner city and help his fellow black people who weren’t so fortunate to have the opportunities that he had.
This is the backdrop that inspired the Chicago Eco House. Quilen assembled a team of young adults in 2014 to help with the initial planning and preparation for the organization. During this time is when he would meet his future wife and partner Hannah Bonham Blackwell who also was committed to the inner city as she was living and serving on the west side of Chicago. Their mutual love and passion for the hood became the foundation for Eco House as they would do anything and everything to get the organization off the ground including taking pies in the face in public places in order to raise money to pay for their 501c3 tax exempt filing.
However, they had trouble raising enough money to secure a property in Englewood so they decided to use their own money and purchase a vacant two flat greystone property in the heart of Englewood. They spent 6 months rehabbing it and once complete their home became the headquarters for the Chicago Eco House as they opened their doors to their neighbors and used their space for youth programming.
As they worked with youth and their neighbors, they never lost sight of the bigger mission to use sustainability to alleviate poverty. So, they organized their neighbors to secure two vacant lots on their block in 2017 to build the first off grid commercial flower farm with the purpose of selling flowers to create jobs for local young people. This initial farm was an immediate success with youth and neighbors that word spread of their work to the point that they were invited into two other neighborhoods (Woodlawn and West Garfield Park) to replicate the model.
Today, the Chicago Eco House has four farms throughout Chicago, one in Detroit, and also operates their own in house flower shop Southside Blooms where they hire local youth to make the flowers that they sell.
Children playing in the first year that Eco House opened its doors
The Chicago Eco House is an emerging leader in sustainable urban agricultural development that is spurring bottom up economic development in the inner city, but in many ways it is a homecoming story that spans three generations and intersects with many of the biggest events that shaped African American history over the last 70 years. The bondage of Quilen’s grandfather being forced to work the land in the Jim Crow South under the sharecropper system has now led to the freedom of enjoying the colorful bounty of blooms on the south side of Chicago through social entrepreneurship!
We are often asked why don’t we grow food instead of flowers. The answer is simple: flowers are a better cash crop! The floral industry in the United States is worth over $35 billion annually but 80 percent of all the flowers in the US are imports from overseas. This creates a huge market gap for domestic growers particularly in urban environments. Furthermore, since people aren’t eating our flowers we don’t have to worry about soil testing, abiding by USDA food safety handling regulations, and we can use rainwater for irrigation. Plus, we don’t have to compete with Big Ag since there is no well established flower player in the US floral industry. The economics are just too attractive for us NOT to grow flowers!
Our award winning social impact model is known for its ingenuity and effectiveness. Our model can best be understood in the following five points:
1* Community Buy In
Establishing community partnerships with people on the ground is the foundation of our model. This helps us to gain access to youth, families, and vacant land which are all the most important aspects of our work. Sustainable Technology Growing in an urban environment presents unique challenges when trying to reach scale. The primary challenge is that the vacant spaces are intermix within the built environment so we do not have the luxury of growing on hundreds of contiguous acres like they do in the country. We adapted to the built environment by installing solar panels to generate power and using the downspouts of buildings to provide water. This technological system enables us to turn a perceived impediment to growth into an accelerant for it.
2* Sustainable Technology
Growing in an urban environment presents unique challenges when trying to reach scale. The primary challenge is that the vacant spaces are intermix within the built environment so we do not have the luxury of growing on hundreds of contiguous acres like they do in the country. We adapted to the built environment by installing solar panels to generate power and using the downspouts of buildings to provide water. This technological system enables us to turn a perceived impediment to growth into an accelerant for it.
Top and bottom: Englewood farm
Community ribbon cutting
youth plant flower seeds
4* Unmatched Production
The combination of community buy in, sustainable technology, and regenerative farm practices leads to unmatched farm production. Our farms are bustling with activity during the growing season as there is plenty of work to keep our young people busy.
creating a bouquet in the workshop
3* Regenerative Farming Practices
We pair our sustainable technology with regenerative growing practices such as cover cropping that help to minimize water usage as well as require zero pesticides, herbicides, or chemical fertilizers. This helps to increase yields and soil health to insure long term growing success.
a happy customer shares on social media
5* Excellent Customer Service
Maintaining an excellent customer experience is key to our success. We do this by handling all the logistics of our deliveries in house, responding to customer inquiries promptly, and by implementing a very customer friendly return policy. This helps with establishing long term customer loyalty.
Detailed financial statements can be found at the end of this document.
Here are a few highlights:
* Earned revenue (listed as business contributions) increased 225% between 2018 and 2019
* Earned revenue increased 526% between 2019 and 2020 (in 2020 the earned revenue is listed as sales for Southside Blooms)
* Achieved a 39% net profit margin in 2020
* Overall organizational revenue increased 237% between 2018 and 2019
* Overall organizational revenue increased 241% between 2019 and 2020
* Earned revenue (Southside Blooms) is our fastest growing revenue driver
* Our grants/donation performance improves with positive earned revenue performance
regenerative methods include using chicken waste and compost
youth harvest zinnias
Our ambition is to become a national organization
with operations in every American city that has a
hood! In order to do this, we are following the
following three step plan to scale
Step 1* Implement Infrastructure for Growth
Our first step is to set up the internal infrastructure to support rapid growth. This includes making sure we have the right people, processes, and resources in place to insure the proper system to support long term expansion. We are well on our way to accomplishing this goal in 2021.
Step 2 *Dominate the Chicagoland Region
The second step is to fully establish ourselves in the Chicagoland region by building what we call our hub and spokes model for market domination. This entails building enough farms to support an estimated customer base of 250,000 people (delivery within a 300 mile radius of Chicago) and according to our estimates we would need between 500 to 750 acres of land to achieve this goal (Chicago has an estimated 3,000 acres of vacant land currently available within its city limits). The “hub” would be the farming/delivery operations in Chicago and the “spokes” would be retail outlets in locations such as Madison, WI, and other smaller markets within a 300 mile radius. This would create an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 jobs which would nearly eliminate the number of young people currently serving some sort of sentence through the Cook County Juvenile Court (estimated to be about 2,700 people per year).
STEP 3 * National Expansion
Once we are fully established in the Chicago region, we would then want to “copy and paste” the Chicago model to other cities that have similar dynamics as Chicago. This could include places such as Los Angeles, St. Louis, Atlanta, and many other cities that suffer from high urban blight and poverty. This would help us to fulfill our greater ambition of eliminating the ghetto as we know it in America.
