Flowers in Tacoma windows offer hope in these dark times
What’s the significance — or the power — of painted flowers in a window?
What can a small example of optimism and resilience do for a community during a pandemic?
Mary Boone, a 57-year-old Tacoma resident, believes small gestures like these can have a greater impact than people realize — and she’s apparently not alone.
“There’s a lot about this situation that’s just devastating. People are dying. People are losing their jobs. People are out of work, losing income and losing the ability to find food. So there’s a lot we could get hopeless about,” Boone said last week about the current COVID-19 pandemic and its rippling impact.
“So holding on to whatever hope and goodness there is, I think we’ve got to, to pull ourselves through.”
Boone’s attempt to help people do just that can be found in her three-panel bay window in Tacoma’s North Slope. Bright flowers, made from Amazon delivery boxes, look out at you — sprouting from a painted patch of green grass and the message, “Hope grows here.”
If you haven’t seen Boone’s effort — which was actually a tag-team installation undertaken with her college-age daughter, Eve Robinson — there’s a decent chance you’ve seen one much like it.
Flowers have blossomed in windows throughout Tacoma and beyond, and while much of it is organic, the project didn’t grow out of nowhere.
There’s also more to it than pretty pictures.
Not long after the devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic started to be felt, MultiCare launched what it calls the Hope Grows Here Project. According to Dori Young, vice president of MultiCare Foundations, the big idea is to help build community while also promoting emotional and mental health.
“The impetus behind it was just the realization that this new reality hit us so hard — it hit us all so hard and so fast — and it got scary so fast. Sometimes that fear is the worst part about it,” said Young. “We wanted to try to do something that would engage the community to help us be together in this.”
For starters, Young said that MultiCare — in partnership with Tacoma’s Rotator design studio — wanted to inspire average folks, like Boone, to get in on the action. So far, it’s working. More than 700 people have signed up.
In addition to flowers in the windows throughout Tacoma, MultiCare has hired local artists to create larger murals throughout the South Sound. You can find them at MultiCare facilities and plenty of other places — like Anthem Coffee in Puyallup, the Old Cannery in Sumner, and soon, the Tacoma Convention Center.
Online, and beyond art, MultiCare has created a collection of resources and activities designed to “promote mental health among individuals and families during a time that’s emotionally and mentally challenging for many,” according to the health care provider. It includes a community message board where people can pen messages of support for essential workers.
While a large health care company is behind it — and the project includes a fundraiser to ramp up mental health care and substance use disorder services throughout the MultiCare Behavioral Health Network — it’s not intended to be marketing, according to Rotator cofounder Lance Kagey.
According to Kagey, the big question Rotator and MultiCare was trying to answer was straightforward but critically important: “How do we tell people that if you’re in crisis, or if you’re feeling isolated or need some type of help, we’re here for you?”
Flowers in windows, Kagey said, can “just be a type of icebreaker.”
Young believes it’s working, even if — like so many reactions to the pandemic — it started from what she described as a place of “desperation.”
“I don’t know that we had clear expectations, and I don’t know that we launched this project knowing what it would or could do,” Young said. “Frankly, I think there was a sense ... that we’ve got to do something.”
So far, Young said the results have been “palpable” — and exceeded expectations.
All you have to do is take a walk around your neighborhood to see it, she said, or talk to the front-line health care workers who’ve been inspired.
“People are coming out in ways that we haven’t seen before, and I think being in the community and walking around seeing these messages of hope helps. While we hate this lockdown, it’s a positive message of what we can choose to do to help each other get through it,” Young said.
“I really do think it’s doing that.”
Boone agrees.
Her home is near several medical facilities, and she hopes the flowers in her window have delivered a small dose of inspiration to front-line medical workers, and anyone else who sees them.
“We’ve got to have hope that it’s going to get better,” Boone said. “We’ve got to have hope that we’re going to get back to normal, sometime soon.”
This story was originally published April 30, 2020 at 5:05 AM.
