Change in Bloom

On a once-abandoned lot in the Englewood neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, you can find bees humming between rows of blooming peonies, workers carefully snipping stems for a wedding bouquet, and solar panels drinking up the sun above them.

What was previously seen by neighbors and passersby as a desolate corner of the city is now a thriving flower farm—and the heart of a growing nonprofit organization that alleviates poverty with sustainability.

This is the vision behind Chicago Eco House and Southside
Blooms, founded by Quilen Blackwell (MS ’15) and his wife, Hannah Bonham Blackwell.

Blackwell’s unconventional journey—from Madison, Wisconsin, to ministry school, and eventually to the University of Denver as a graduate student—laid the groundwork for a model for revitalization on the South and West Sides of the city and beyond.

“We’re not going to stop until we realize the dream of establishing flowers as a new anchor industry, not just in Chicago but throughout all inner cities in the United States,” the social entrepreneur says.

Rooted in action

Blackwell’s path to this work has been anything but conventional.

Originally from Madison, he moved to Chicago in 2011 to attend ministry school. While living in the area, he tutored at a high school in Englewood, which opened his eyes to how poverty and disinvestment affected young people.

He determined that he wanted to dedicate his professional journey to changing the lives of young people living in Englewood and other neighborhoods on the South and West Sides—and the foundation of Chicago Eco House was born in 2014.

He and Hannah purchased a formerly abandoned property that became their home and the headquarters of Chicago Eco House. They purchased their first lot-turned-flower-farm in 2017, and in 2020, they opened Southside Blooms, the in-house shop where flowers are processed and sold as bouquets and other floral products.

Southside Blooms employs 25 young adults aged 16-24 and has an annual revenue of around $2 million. Still, Blackwell felt he needed more tools to make a deeper impact.

That’s what led him to pursue a master’s degree at DU’s College of Professional Studies in environmental sustainability with a focus on energy and sustainability.

“I felt like I needed more formal education if I was going to go deep down this path,” he says. “DU helped me think through how we can overcome these real-world problems using sustainable solutions.”

Inspired by coursework on renewable energy and sustainable infrastructure, he worked to make the flower farms off-grid, installing solar panels and rainwater catchment systems.

Blackwell even put his master’s thesis topic—conserving embodied energy in buildings—to the test, turning his home into a lab for sustainable living, with solar energy, chickens, and water reuse systems.

“It’s not feasible to just bulldoze every building. Vacant lots that you see in an urban environment used to be a house or a corner store, so I thought, ‘There’s got to be a better way to go about it,’” he says.

A ‘Garden of Eden’ in the city

Chicago has an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 vacant lots, Blackwell says. The Southside Blooms team has secured land through community partnerships and, more recently, the Cook County Land Bank. Their farms span 10+ acres in the Chicago neighborhoods of Woodlawn, Englewood, Pilsen, and West Garfield Park, at the Cook County Jail, and in Gary, Indiana.

“Every time someone buys a bouquet, that’s helping us build more farms and hire more youth,” Blackwell explains. “With every farm, that’s one less vacant lot and one more solar-powered flower farm that attracts all sorts of beneficial insects and birds. It’s like you’re building a modern Garden of Eden in the city.”

He says people in the community were skeptical at first, but “once they saw we were serious and started getting traction in the marketplace, they bought in.”

Growing opportunities

More than anything, Southside Blooms is about people. Young adults who might otherwise struggle to find work are gaining employment—and a creative outlet.

“A lot of our youth are very creative, and floristry is an inherently artistic endeavor,” Blackwell says. “It’s something we knew we could teach them pretty quickly, and they also proved they can excel at it.”

Take Rashod, for example. When he joined the team at 16, he was struggling in high school and didn’t have many alternatives for his future education or career. Now, at age 20, he’s a manager and one of the team’s best florists.

“It’s extremely rewarding to see that a kid can get an opportunity in their own neighborhood to have a better life,” Blackwell says.

Southside Blooms has plans to open its second flower shop in North Lawndale this fall and, from there, Blackwell hopes to bring flower farms to as many neighborhoods across the city and country as possible. He also hopes to see some of his staff start their own businesses, whether that be a flower shop, a farm, or something else.

Blackwell credits his time at DU for grounding his bold vision in something practical and helping him see that he could make a significant impact as a leader in the nonprofit sector.

“At the end of the day, it’s about preserving life in all its forms, and my DU education has helped make that possible. We’re paving a different path forward in the floral industry and the nonprofit industry—and yielding some pretty amazing results so far.”