It's a bright and chilly November morning and on a corner lot on Whitney St. in northwest Rochester, Shamar McCray walks among rows and rows of last summer's flower beds, carefully selecting purple, yellow and orange dahlias and zinnias and white gladiolas.
The colorful blooms stand defiantly amid the brown, withering remains of Green Visions' summer crop.
"The loose petal dahlias, they last you about a week, maybe a week and a half in water, compared to the tight petal dahlias, which will last you a good two and a half," McCray said.
He can tell you a lot about flowers. He learned it all right here eight summers ago, at a once-vacant property in JOSANA, one of the city's poorest neighborhoods, and one beset by decades of crime, unemployment and abandonment.
McCray was a new father in 2012 when he was released from a juvenile lockup at the age of 19. He was looking for a job when he saw a Craigslist ad for Green Visions, a workforce development program run by the nonprofit Greentopia.
They were looking for 18- to 24-year-olds to plant and maintain flower gardens. The part-time work provided a stipend to cover the costs of transportation, child care, or other barriers they had to overcome to get to work five days a week.
"Every year, this is grass and dirt in the spring," said Morgan Barry, director of Green Visions. “They plant every seed, and they plant 5,000 plugs, and they plant hundreds of dahlias and they take care of them every step of the way.”
Since 2012, more than 150 young adults from this neighborhood have participated in the program, which is marking a milestone this winter with year-round programming. Barry is recruiting up to 10 young people to study landscaping as a potential career. They will attend classes inside a recently renovated, once abandoned 120-year-old house on the property. The program is a partnership with Cornell Cooperative Extension. At the end of 12 weeks, students will earn a landscape technician certification just as spring is approaching and those kinds of skills are in demand.
Beyond this, Barry said, students will get help with resume writing, financial literacy, obtaining a driver's license, and anything else they need to establish a career.
“It's insane to think back on, and just the impact that that you know, one organization can have on a community. It's kind of humbling," said Barry.
Many of the Green Vision participants are homeless. The vast majority don't have high school diplomas when they start the program. Some of them are single parents.
Greentopia executive director Lisa Baron says Green Visions has been a motivating force for the entire organization because it symbolizes their mission of creating green spaces that elevate communities both economically and environmentally.
“This is so valuable to Rochester to have a program that beautifies their city and uplifts youth that, in some respects, have been forgotten and pushed aside and not valued," she said.
The recruiting process has become a lot easier over the last 12 years, according to Barry. He said they still walk up and down Jay Street and Lyell Avenue to find kids who might be interested. He pointed at a yellow, two-story house across the street from the flower farm.
"We've employed, I want to say, five kids from that house.”
For McCray, it was more than just a summer job. Sure, he did show up here every day to pull weeds, till the soil, water the blooms, and arrange them into bouquets for the Public Market. But he also learned a lot about himself.
"I think what it did for me is help me understand what I needed myself to grow, the attention that I needed to give myself, the watering that I needed to give myself, the clearing away of debris that didn't matter, as far as weeds in my life," he said.
McCray said Barry would ask him and his co-workers a lot of questions about their future, something kids in his neighborhood never thought much about.
"We didn't look past that summer, we didn't look past that week," he said. "And the question that rattled our brain was, 'What are you going to be doing in five years from now?' "
The seeds that were planted that summer have grown into something Shamar is proud of. He's now an apprentice with a local electricians' union. And when you ask him what he'll be doing in another five years, he has an answer. He expects to be a journeyman electrician by then and maybe one day, he'll get a real estate license.
In this bunch of flowers he's been gathering, he sees himself.
"I'm these flowers. I'm the zinnia, I'm the dahlia," he said. "As much as I want to grow and how strong I want my roots to be, it's about the attention to detail and the work that we put in individually every single day."
