In April 1977, Projects Inc. helped the Duval House residential treatment program in Jacksonville, Florida establish a greenhouse / horticulture program. The purpose of the program was to further augment the other treatment programs already in progress at the halfway house.

After Projects raised the initial capital and received authorization from the state, they helped the Duval House staff establish a small horticulture business that was operated by young men in treatment at the halfway house. The purpose of the program was to teach participants (many of the previous drug dealers) the skills needed to run a small business, and they were provided with real world experiences that helped reinforce much of the counseling and treatment they were already provided by Duval House.

The program was run as a for-profit business, and each young man profited in proportion to the time and energy he expended on the program. The young men who passed through the program encountered measurable success when they exited Duval House – and many of them used the skills they learned during the program to in jobs that they obtained as a result of their participation in the program.

Cecil Pollard, the Projects program supervisor, recalls one of the young men who was transformed by the program: “Ron, who was one of the ‘Greenhouse Boys,’ was a big cocaine dealer in Jacksonville before being admitted to Duval. For three months he didn’t do much except keep clean and comb his hair. But once the horticulture program was in place, his enthusiasm couldn’t be contained. In fact, he was so interested in what we were doing that it became difficult to feed him enough information, and he displayed remarkable initiative.”