It was a former carburetor shop.
If you cross Gay Street Bridge and head on to Sevier Avenue, you’ll see it, as glamorous as you’d expect a former carburetor shop to be. Colorless beige walls complement cracking sidewalks and a chain link fence across the street. The sign above the garbage can on the corner advises: “Keep Knoxville Scruffy, not Trashy.”
At 802 Sevier Ave., they don’t build carburetors anymore. They build relationships.
That’s how Jenny Arthur explains it to me in the small office she operates inside. A Unitarian minister/Tai Chi instructor, Jenny runs Borderland Tees t-shirt company with her partner, Bob.
Look around campus one day – chances are you’ll see their work on the backs of your classmates. Sex Week, the UT chapter of NIMBioS, College Scholars and many other organizations have contracted Borderland to print their shirts. Jenny says their small outfit offers more affordable quotes than most competitors by at least 30 percent. Business, she says, is good.
Last October, the Daily Beacon reported on Borderland Tees and called it a “for-profit social enterprise.” According to the story, the two owners use the T-shirt business to fund their community services.
When I read the story last fall, I wondered what kind of community services Borderland provided. This year, delving deeper into Knoxville’s homeless community for my senior thesis has made me even more curious. Most places have a mission statement or a quantified program for their community outreach; Borderland seems to take a different approach.
So I drive across Henley Street Bridge and head east on Sevier Avenue. I meet with Jenny Arthur in a small office filled with T-shirts and boxes. I ask her what the Borderland Tees mission statement is.
Confused, she smiles at me. “We just stick to a very simple concept,” Jenny says. “We create relationships.”
Is there a quota of people you serve? Do you target a specific population, such as former felons or the mentally ill? How, and who, do you help?
Shaking her head, she smiles again, eyes crinkling at the corners. “We call it a place of no last chance. Anybody’s welcome.”
I still do not understand, so she begins to share examples. There was re-Bob, a former convict who builds custom birdhouses next door. Bob and Jenny helped him find housing; they also helped him acquire financial assistance from the federal government. Another guy – Jenny, respectfully, did not share his name – who suffered from cerebral palsy now has housing thanks to their intervention. In their own basement, they’ve offered a friend who battled alcoholism a place to stay.
The two men who work the T-shirt press, Jenny says, have their own stories to tell. So too does Rob Roy, the owner of Borderland Bike Billboards, a business he started with their help. These are her friends, and their privacy she respects.
Throughout the course of our conversation, however, Jenny shares her own life story freely. A journey that has led Jenny from Gatlinburg, Tennessee to Massachusetts and now, to Borderland. She has a master’s degree in poetry, and she’s nearly ashamed (“It sounds so pretentious!”) to admit she graduated from Yale Divinity School. A minister at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church, she also teaches Tai Chi at the Taoist Tai Chi Society on North Central.
In my notes, I write: does this woman ever sleep?
At the end of our chat, she offers to give me a tour of the facility. In a back room, I find a copy of Max Ehrmann’s “Desiderata.” It’s printed on a piece of wood and packed in a box with other odds and ends, set aside to be sold in an upcoming rummage sale. Bob and Jenny plan to use the proceeds to convert the space into a community room, a place where their friends can gather peacefully.
One of the lines in the poem catches my eye: “Be yourself. Especially, do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass.”
I pay cash, on the spot, for the wood; and as Jenny accepts it, she offers to help me with my senior thesis. It occurs to me that I’ve entered a relationship with someone who creates relationships for a living. I think back to a phrase she said earlier, something about “capitalism for the common good.”
And on the way out the door, I notice something I missed on the way in.
There’s grass growing in the cracked sidewalks.
R.J. Vogt is a senior in College Scholars. He recommends all student organizations to invest in their community by contracting T-shirts through Borderland Tees. He can be reached at [email protected].
