News / Community
New lives bloom for Palestinian refugee women
Brunswick East florist provides paid work for recent escapees from the war in Gaza
Mark Phillips
A GROUP of young Palestinian refugee women are making a fresh start at life through a Brunswick East florist business.
The four women, all recent refugees from the war in Gaza, are working and learning new skills at The Beautiful Bunch, a floral delivery service that operates as a social enterprise.
The Beautiful Bunch was established in 2020 with the purpose of providing employment and teaching skills to asylum seekers and refugees who have resettled in Australia.
Its Girls From Gaza program – which delivers bouquets of freshly arranged flowers every Friday – has been launched to specifically tailor for Palestinian refugees.
The program provides paid work along with skills to secure to secure permanent employment and financial independence in Australia for women who have escaped the war. Each group of women will spend eight months with The Beautiful Bunch.
“We are the only not-for-profit that we know of that works exclusively with young women from refugee backgrounds, focusing on employment pathways,” said the business’s founder and director, Jane Marx.
“There’s a lot of people doing phenomenal things in this space, but it is just us that are working with this group.
“They face far more significant barriers to workforce entry than their male counterparts and the work that we do we is just the tip of the iceberg.”
Marx, a social enterprise veteran since her university days, launched The Beautiful Bunch during the Covid pandemic in late-2020.
The pandemic had forced the closure of a previous social enterprise, events and hospitality business Merchant Road but Marx combined with three northern African women to plan the floristry while she was pregnant with her first child in the midst of one of Melbourne’s longest lockdowns.
It moved from Fitzroy North to Brunswick East earlier this year.
The impetus for a floristry came from feedback from participants in Marx’s previous business who indicated what they most enjoyed about the work was not food and beverage service, but flower arranging.
Marx’s research found that during 2020 online flower sales were one of the few growth industries in retail.
“While nothing is truly pandemic-proof, it was certainly an industry that was able to continue to function during the pandemic,” Marx said.
“It was very intentional that we launched into a market that was growing considerably.”
By the time the business opened in October 2020, Marx’s daughter had been born. Within weeks, the business had grown from delivering seven bunches of flowers to 70 every day. Word of mouth played a crucial role in getting it off the ground.
Advertisement
Today, The Beautiful Bunch has five full-time staff and 15 trainees on its books.
Marx says credit for the business’s success to date must go to the refugee and migrant women who have worked for it.
“We really did start from the very bottom and I built this in partnership with the women that it’s intended to serve. And I think that’s what makes the heart and soul of this just so special, is that they have really informed what this place looks like at every single stage, including the very beginning.
“We are a same day floral delivery service, so it’s a logistical challenge every single day, if you can order something before 12 o’clock and you can see it on your doorstep two hours later [and] it’s a perishable product.
“That’s no small undertaking that the young women in this program helped me figure out how we’d actually have a fantastic courier service and be able to offer phenomenal customer service.”
Women are referred to The Beautiful Bunch by organisations that help to settle newly arrived refugees in the community, such as the Brotherhood of St Laurence.
They are paid award wages from day one and spend about eight months learning all aspects of the business until they have another job lined up. That extends beyond the basics of floral arranging to business administration and financial literacy. About 50 women have been through the program since 2020.
“It is a phenomenal program, something that’s taken us really four years to build, and we’re very proud of it,” Marx said.
“It’s something that I think all young women, not just new arrivals to Australia, really need exposure to. I know I could have used it in my early-20s.”
The Beautiful Bunch now has a waiting list for its program and in the past year, it has seen increasing numbers of women who have been forcibly displaced by Israel’s war in the Palestinian territory of Gaza.
Shatha was studying software engineering before fleeing Gaza, and hopes to resume her studies in Australia.
The Girls From Gaza component allows customers to order a delivery of a fresh bunch of flowers every Friday for $50 a week. This differs from the fast-paced same day delivery service that the rest of the business provides.
Marx said the initiative grew out of a desire to do something meaningful for refugees from the region.
“I listened to all of the women who work here, and the idea that came out of those meetings was that we wanted to do something that was really impactful for young women who would be arriving here [feeling] pretty traumatised,” Marx said.
“That was the intent, and then we looked at what we know that we do best … [which is] provide young women from refugee backgrounds with a genuine sense of sisterhood and community and, vitally, paid employment.
“So we tried to think about what we could do to welcome additional women, ensure that it was still paid [work] and ensure that the work that they were doing was a little bit different to the work that we ordinarily do in our studio.”
For Marx, The Beautiful Bunch doesn’t stop there.
She now has her sights set on a new business stream: growing flowers in an urban environment. About 60% of flowers and foliage sold through Australian florists are imported, and they contain toxic chemicals that are sprayed to preserve them during transportation, Marx said.
“We are just coming to the end of a 12-month project researching a hydroponic rooftop rose farm,” Marx said. “It’s been a dream of ours for a long time to grow the flowers that we put into everyone’s daily bunches.”
The financial modelling for the flower growing operations has been completed, and fundraising will start soon. While a retail shopfront for The Beautiful Bunch is not currently on the agenda, Marx did not rule it out in the future.
Support independent local journalism
We are an independent hyperlocal news organisation owned and run by the people in your community. With your support, we can continue to produce unique and valuable local journalism for Brunswick and the inner north of Melbourne.
