Sitting in her apartment across the street from the Capitol Building, Delberta Clark quietly listens to jazz music and surveys the plants she is growing on shelves. Green vines are growing out of the water-filled jars she hopes to sell as part of her small community project down the block, which she calls the We Got Your Back Team.

On Grant Street, Clark has set up a small shop of sorts on a concrete slab inside a gated area that’s about 10 feet wide and 300 feet long. She sells used items like plates and furniture, but also her own handmade walking canes. In warmer weather she can be found sitting in a chair, hoping to sell her wares to raise funds for the homeless in the area.

“I’m a community person, I like to get involved and do things,” she said. “A city is so big, you have to have a community and focus on the people that you’re around.”

Clark, or Lady Clark as she is known in the neighborhood, started the project with the help of Knights of Columbus, a Catholic-based charitable organization at 1555 Grant St., which is the building next to her shop. She first connected with the organization after she spent several years picking up trash in the area. The Knights provided Clark with the space at the beginning of 2017. It has also given her portable tents for shade and an electric outlet so she can play jazz on the radio as she waits outside for customers.

In 1955, Clark moved to Colorado from Texas. She had her first son when she was 16, and went on to raise several more children as well as eight grandchildren. But now, she said it’s time to give back to herself.

“It’s my turn now to live and do what I want to do,” she said.

And what she wants to do, at 86 years old, is help others.

Before she moved to Denver, she and her late husband Robert would feed homeless people out of their home in Aurora. With some of the money from her shop, she hopes to buy toiletries and other items for the homeless in the area.

“I want to be able to buy what I want to buy and support that way,” she said. “They deserve to have more than just hand-me-downs.”

She is hoping to eventually get a business license for her store. She is also hoping she can teach people to make things and sell them. By using found items such as plastic soda bottles, people can make and sell their own planters, Clark said.

Clark constantly needs to be doing something. In addition to her plants, she makes canes out of large branches she finds. She peels off the bark and carves shapes out of the branches. Then she sands and stains them. She can make planters out of wood. She also sews. As a child, Clark’s mother taught her many of these skills, as well as how to use them to help others. Clark said her mother taught her “how to give.”

The seeds for her plants have become a metaphor for how she views life, Clark said: A small seed can produce a large plant. Her goal is to encourage others and tell them that everyone has a purpose.

“I just like people to feel that they are somebody,” she said. “I just want to be a little drop in the bucket of telling people what they can do.”