Bread & Roses gives gift of floristry to women seeking refuge from torture and violence

16.12.2023 - 14:26 / irishtimes.com / Fionnuala Fallon

As an experienced and respected professional florist, Róisín Godfrey has spent the last eight years working alongside some of the biggest names in the industry in the UK and Ireland, a career that has taken her to some of the most beautiful private houses, hotels and art galleries in the world.

It was while jobbing for the well-known London floristry business Scarlet & Violet in 2017 that she first met fellow florist Liv Wilson, one of the founders of the award-winning UK group Bread & Roses, which has “a mission to help women from refugee backgrounds flourish”.

The two very quickly became firm friends. “Liv,” says Godfrey, “is just one of those people who is always pushing to make things better. ‘Inspirational’ is an overused word but she’s genuinely that – a person who makes you believe that we can all make a difference. That there’s far more good in the world than bad. When she first told me about this programme that she and her friends Olivia Head and Sneh Jani-Patel set up in 2016 to provide floristry training programmes for female refugees in London, I was just so impressed by what they were trying to achieve.

“And they have achieved it. Bread & Roses has quickly become this really positive agent of change that provides a safe and friendly forum where women from around the world can harness the many therapeutic benefits that come from working with flowers. It empowers them in so many ways, helping them to regain their sense of confidence, to reconnect with their body, repair their often-damaged sense of self-belief, to once again find joy in the world.

“There’s also that great sense of independence that comes from learning a valuable new skill that’s potentially so useful as a way of becoming financially