Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Hannah Bonham Blackwell. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Hannah, thanks for joining us today. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?

The mission of Southside Blooms is to “use sustainability to alleviate poverty”. My husband and I saw that sustainability was becoming a major part of where business was headed, but we felt that people living in places like the inner city were going to be the last to benefit from it. After moving into the community we sought to help, we realized that we were not going to be successful connect people to jobs in sustainability – we would need to create them. That prompted us to look at what we had (neighborhoods full of vacant lots) and to start to research what we could grow that could sustain true careers. That is when we landed on flowers. Flowers are a 35 billion dollar industry worldwide, but 80% of all flowers that you see come from overseas. This creates a huge carbon footprint and relys on the use of heavy chemicals and pesticides. We decided that we were going to be a part of changing that, and would be able to create meaningful careers for a whole population (young people in the Inner city) that were largely left behind by the regular workforce.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

I was not always a florist. I actually worked as a hairstylist for 15 years before trading in my hair scissors for flower shears! When we found that flowers could be the cash crop that would provide the employment opportunities we were looking for, I jumped in headfirst to floristry, learning everything I could about flower farming and floral design. I’m proud to say that 5 years after that pivot and 2.5 years after doing this fulltime, we are now a full-service florist, farming on over 5 acres of land here in the inner-city of Chicago, with partner farms in Gary Indiana and Detroit Michigan. We do everything from high-end events and weddings to bouquet subscriptions, flower CSAs and retail bouquets, all of it put together by the youth in our community under my direction. We also started making our own seed-paper greeting cards in-house, make honey beeswax candles and sell honey from the bees located on several of our farms.

One of the goals we had early on was to make our flowers accessible to people outside of our neighborhood. We live in a very wealthy city, but that wealth is in neighborhoods far away from ours. In order to pull in money to our community from other areas of the city, we developed our own delivery model that helps anyone in the Chicagoland area have easy access to our products.

We also take sustainability very seriously, choosing to reflect it in small ways (compostable packaging, upcycled,
local newspaper that we wrap each bouquet in) to big ways (not using floral foam or agrawool – both harmful to the environment in different ways – composting all of our flower clippings, creating our own compost for our farms, farming off-grid using solar power and rainwater irrigation).

While we love flowers, our work is really about preserving life. Gunshots and police sirens are an everyday reality here, with far too many young people loosing their lives too early. Youth in our community need an alternative and they need hope that there is something other than the streets for them. That is truly what we are offering and what people are helping with when they choose to get their flowers from Southside Blooms. As a non-profit, 100% of the money spent on our products goes back into making our model work – and employing more kids.

Have you ever had to pivot?

Covid was a big test for us that ended up propelling us to where we are now. Like many florists, all of the events that we had cancelled at the start of the pandemic and we weren’t quite sure what we were going to do. We had about 15,000 tulips that were about to come up on our farm, so we decided to offer bouquets with free delivery. We sold out of everything we had, leading us to create a flower CSA with free delivery for our summer flowers and never looked back.

If we had just tried to wait it out instead of pivoting, we wouldn’t have survived. But the stakes were too high and there were too many lives that would be affected, so we did what we could and came out better for it!

How’d you meet your business partner?

This one is fun, since he is my husband :)

We actually were set up by a friend, me thinking that it was a meeting to share our different work in the inner-city and him thinking it was a blind date! After that mix-up (and me being late!) we started dating and were engaged within 6 months and married 7 months after. Seven years and 3 kids later, we are stronger than ever because of our passion for the work we do and the people we serve.

We are very different people with very different backgrounds but what really drew us to each other was our faith and our shared mission to see the inner-city change and lives saved. Not everyone can work with their spouse, but in our case it has turned out to be the perfect combination of gifts and talents. I handle all of the creative pieces, the details and the execution of the ideas we come up with, while he is the business mind, handles partnerships and runs the non-profit.

Contact Info:

• Website: southsideblooms.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/southsideblooms
• Facebook: facebook.com/southsideblooms

Image Credits
Southside Blooms