Hope blooms through Flowers for Food

Promising program for the homeless rooted in one man's initiative
STORY BY UNNATI GANDHI and VIDEO BY JOHN LEHMANN
Globe and Mail Update
March 25, 2008 at 8:01 PM EDT

[Note: TJ was part of the Streams of Justice Squat last Fall.]

VANCOUVER. TJ Walker's raspy voice is difficult to make out over the sounds of the SkyTrain passing overhead and the constant traffic manoeuvring around him.

But as the slight man shuffles from his makeshift flower display at the corner of Expo Boulevard and Carrall Street to the curb, extending a dozen roses out to anyone who glances his way, his message is clear.

“Flowers for food?” TJ, as he prefers to be called, asks a pedestrian obviously trying to get out of the rain.

“I don't have a girlfriend,” the man shrugs.

“Well, not if you don't give her flowers.”

The man smiles, but walks off.

But for every 15 people that walk or drive by the man with the heaps of roses and carnations near GM Place, one usually stops and buys, he said. And with those sales, TJ last month was able to get his first home after 11 years on the streets.

Business wasn't always so brisk for TJ, who has been selling flowers on the street for five years.

At first, the only flowers he could find were the ones he and a volunteer weeded out of a nearby community garden. The wilted fistfuls didn't attract much attention, let alone cash.

But he continued to sell flowers, he said, because “what else can you give someone and always get a smile?”

Then one day, two years ago, a man in a Honda Civic stopped to ask, “How much?”

“Whatever you're happy to pay,” TJ said.

The man, Marrett Green, a local businessman and homeless activist, said he was inspired by TJ's entrepreneurship.

“My heart just immediately went out to him because he's trying to do something with himself. So I thought if there's any way I could help him, I would,” Mr. Green said.

It took dozens of phone calls, and a little begging of his own, he said, before he got his first bite.

Make Scents, a Vancouver-area flower distributor, agreed to help Mr. Green turn nothing into something. From that point on, other distributors agreed to do the same, and Flowers for Food blossomed.

Read the rest and watch the video here