The Newtown Florist Club has been featured in several television reports. To view a report, click on any of the following video links.

The following is a brief excertp from an article by  by DEBBIE GILBERT, The Times, Gainesville.

Even as the fumes of a landfill fire still lingered in parts of Hall County Thursday, a group of environmentalists came to Gainesville to study air pollution from a historical perspective.

The San Francisco-based National Bucket Brigade, which trains volunteers to collect air samples in their neighborhoods, is holding its annual conference in Atlanta Saturday. Some of the participants arrived early and took a bus to Gainesville to go on a "toxic tour" with the Newtown Florist Club.

To read the complete article, please click here.

In the 1950s, Faye Bush helped organize the Newtown Florist Club, a group of African American housewives in a neighborhood of Gainesville who collected money to provide funeral wreaths for bereaved families in their community. As time passed, an increasing number of collections were required and members of the club, bearing roses, found themselves attending more and more funerals. An unusually high number of people in their neighborhood seemed to be dying, and from distinctly similar illnesses. Faye, and other members of the club, began to suspect that these deaths were related to the proximity of various factories in the town.

An excerpt from "The Newtown Story": One Community's Fight for Environmental Justice, by Ellen Griffith Spears, as printed in Southern Changes magazine,  Volume 20, Number 4, 1998, pp. 12-15.

The following excerpt is from The Newtown Story: One Community's Fight for Environmental Justice, written by Southern Changes managing editor Ellen Spears and photographed by Atlanta independent photojournalist Michael A. Schwarz. This oral history chronicles the story of Newtown, an African-American neighborhood in Gainesville, Georgia.

Following a deadly tornado that ripped through Gainesville in 1936, segregated housing for black residents was built on a landfill beside the railroad tracks. Industrial development burgeoned in close proximity. Formed by women of Newtown in the 1950s, the Florist Club started with members caring for the sick and buying flowers for community funerals. Through the turbulent 1960s and 70s, the Florist Club members became vocal leaders for civil rights and community improvement. By early 1990, members of the Club realized that many in the community had been dying from the same kinds of cancer and from lupus. Suspicious, they began canvassing the neighborhood, taking family histories and piecing together a puzzle that remains unsolved. As part of the movement for environmental justice all over the South and the nation, local organizations like the Newtown Florist Club are tackling the disproportionate degradation of the environment pervasive in communities of color. Women are playing key leadership roles, defining and transforming culture in place-based, identity-affirming organizations to fight the politics of growth, corporate abuse, and the exclusion of people of color from business and government decision-making.

The following is a brief excerpt of an article by  ASHLEY COX, The Times, Gainesville.

Sign-ups have begun for the Newtown Florist Club's annual summer leadership course for young women.
        The six and one-half week course, offered to girls ages 10 to 17, is titled Current Issues in Leadership and Peacemaking Education. 
        "It's basically to help young women achieve their goals," said Faye Bush, executive director of the Newtown Florist Club. "They also will learn more about leadership skills." 
        The course will be from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. May 29 through July 13 and will meet at the Fair Street Learning Center. 
        Girls who participate will receive one high school credit for the course, Bush said. 
        A certified public school teacher will lead the course, which will be separated into two classes based on the girls' ages. 
        One will be for girls ages 10-13, the other for girls ages 14-17. 
        This is the seventh year that the club has offered the course to girls. The curriculum was written by a former Newtown Florist Club staff member based on two main types of research. 
        There is a videotaped and written interview study of the leadership characteristics and heritage of the women in the Newtown Florist Club, a local community organization which has been around for more than 50 years.

To read the complete article  please click here.
 

The Newtown Florist Club is already making plans for the construction of another home in the Newtown part of Gainesville which it will market to low-income families.

The club showed off it's first such dwelling - located on Black Drive - last week.

This article (written by Faye Bush) was published in the Gainesville Times July 27, 2007.

In a time when the public is deluged by negative images of young people, I could not have been prouder than I was last week when the Newtown Florist Club held its graduation for our seventh Summer Leadership Program for Girls.

Each year, a different class of young girls enters the program one way and leaves forever changed because the so many wonderful people in Gainesville take the time to share experiences and guidance to young people who might not otherwise get it at home or in school.

It has been nearly a decade since we first conceived of the idea of bringing young girls together with role models from the community to simply hear what it means firsthand to be a public servant, a teacher, police officer, banker or one of many more occupations and professions that might seem unattainable.

At 73, Faye Bush has dedicated 55 years of her life to the environmental justice efforts of the Newtown Florist Club. And now she's receiving a bit of recognition for her service as a semifinalist in the national Volvo for Life Awards.

Bush joined the club when she was 18, and is now its executive director. Bush and others from around the country nominated in four categories are vying for the grand prize, which grants a $100,000 donation to a charity of the winner's choice and a Volvo vehicle for life.

"They called me about a month ago and asked me to send them a photo because I was (among the semifinalists)," Bush said. "I was really shocked and really excited. I didn't believe it was true."