Chicago Flower Power
(WCIU, Chicago, 12.14.16)
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Author: rafindianapolis
Bouquets make a difference
By Lynn Sygiel, editor, Charitable Advisors
At Random Acts of Flowers (RAF), recipients of the arrangements are touched and surprised.
“The calls we get from these recipients, they just make you weep because you know what that arrangement looked like. You know it was not a big extravagant bouquet, it was a tiny little happy, made-with-love arrangement to a stranger,” said Alison Kothe, Indianapolis’ RAF executive director
One Eskenazi Hospital patient called the week after a delivery and left a voicemail saying, “‘They’re making me go to this rehab place way out on 38th Street, but they cannot make me not take my flowers. They may kick me out, but I’m taking my flowers.’ It was so cute, and it was wonderful to think that a week after we made the delivery, her flowers were still well enough to go to the rehab place,” said Kothe.
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(Indianapolis, Charitable Advisors, 12.12.16)
The healing power of flowers
By Lynn Sygiel, editor, Charitable Advisors
Why Indianapolis? Five years ago, Betty Stilwell, then chief philanthropy officer at IU Health, mentioned the organization to [now-RAF Indianapolis Executive Director, Alison] Kothe. Stilwell said she had been talking with Jay Hicks, president and CEO of Prime Care Properties and Management. After meeting RAF’s founder and joining its national board, he thought Indianapolis was ready to become involved.
“Hicks was really the mover and shaker behind the Random Acts of Flowers in Indianapolis,” Kothe said. Once the commitment was made, things moved quickly. The first seed-money house party was in March of this year, and the new 501(c)3 moved into its space in September and started deliveries the next month.
As of early December, over 1,245 arrangements had been delivered to area hospitals and nursing homes.
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(Charitable Advisors, 12/12/16)
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Random Acts of Flowers Delivers Encouragement
to Stanford Hospital Patients
(StanfordHealthCare.org, 12.6.16)
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When Camille Kennedy enters patient rooms at Stanford Health Care, she is reminded of the isolation she felt when she was admitted to the hospital after an unexpected trip to the Emergency Department.
“When you end up in the hospital, you may find yourself in a place you did not plan to be,” she said. “You think your life is going one way, and it takes a turn.”
These days, Kennedy uses her experience as a patient as motivation to help break through the isolation other patients experience. Kennedy is executive director for Random Acts of Flowers Silicon Valley, an organization that delivers recycled flowers and encouragement to Stanford hospital patients each month, and to patients at hospitals and healthcare facilities throughout the Bay Area.
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Emilie’s Story
or, The Ripple Effect of Delivering Hope
Just as each bouquet made by our volunteers is different, each recipient has a unique story. As the last day unfolded along our GROW 2016 fundraising tour – which included stops at our branches in Tampa Bay, Knoxville, San Francisco, and Chicago – our celebrity guest speaker, HGTV host Chris Lambton, had a particularly touching visit with a woman named Emilie.
Emilie is a resident at Dobson Plaza, a senior care facility in Evanston, IL. On this cool November morning, she was surprised and charmed by the handsome stranger bringing her flowers on a Thursday. And Chris found himself not just delivering hope, but receiving the kind of joy one only gets from giving.
The special moment was amplified when, after delivering bouquets given new life by Random Acts of Flowers Chicago to some 30 residents at Dobson Plaza, Chris retraced his steps down the hallway to leave. When he stopped to say a final goodbye to Emilie, he was moved to see her clutching the vase of repurposed flowers he had given her earlier that day.
“That’s powerful,” Chris said. “There is absolutely no doubt that what you are doing is meaningful when you see something like that.”
We learned more of Emilie’s story when her son, David, reached out to Chris via email the next day –
She moved to Dobson Plaza three years ago from her hometown of Springfield, where she spent 35 years as a Montessori teacher before her retirement. Despite being much closer to one of her sons and her grandchildren, the transition from Springfield to Evanston was difficult.
Hi Chris,
You don’t know me – my name is David, and I am the son of Emilie, who I believe you met yesterday during your visit to Dobson Plaza nursing home in Evanston, Illinois.
Dobson staff told me that you brought Mom flowers and spent a little time with her, and I just wanted to say thank you. I’m sure this made her day. I see her every weekend, but all visitors are appreciated. The transition for her from Springfield, where she is from, to Evanston has been difficult for her, and little acts of kindness go a long way.
Again, many, many thanks. I truly appreciate it, and I know she did as well.
David later shared, “In the process of getting Mom through that transition, I’ve come to realize that, when you reach a certain age, the best thing you could give to a person is time.” Chris’s visit was just that, a personal moment of kindness and a step out of Emilie’s everyday routine. David added. “After Chris Lambton’s visit, Mom talked to me about it and she just lit up. She was touched by the flowers, and I – in turn – was touched because, again, that’s something that someone beyond our family did for her. It really meant a lot. It meant a lot to her, and it meant a lot to me.”
News of David’s message to Chris along with photographs of Emilie with her bouquet spread across the Random Acts of Flowers branches and our national headquarters. In tandem, they affected us deeply and reminded us of the ever-expanding ripple effect of delivering hope and encouragement. Chris’s delivery touched Emilie and her family which, in turn, touched our organization as a whole, revitalizing us and refocusing us on the value of our mission.
Happiness Delivered: Random Acts of Flowers
(Towne Post, Broad Ripple)
Sometimes an idea is so simple in concept, but makes a huge impact. The idea of making people’s lives brighter by hand-delivering flower arrangements is the driving motivation behind Random Acts of Flowers, which opened a location in South Broad Ripple in mid-October.
Random Acts of Flowers is a non-profit organization that recycles used bouquets and delivers them to hospitals and nursing homes across the country. Started in Knoxville, Tenn., in 2008, this simple idea of delivering flowers to people in need has expanded to multiple cities, including Indianapolis.
Lindsay Potter, program manager at the newly opened Indianapolis location at 1057 E 54th St., is excited to bring this spirit of giving to Indianapolis. The Indianapolis Random Acts of Flowers location operates with a small staff, and the majority of help comes from volunteers. Potter said she loves the positive impact the organization has on the volunteers.
“Here’s something you can do that feels good, where you can say to someone, ‘I live in your community and I care about you and I want you to be happy.’”
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Writer & Photographer / Stephanie Duncan
We all know about Black Friday, Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday, but have you heard about Giving Tuesday? This year it’s Nov. 29.
With the holidays coming sooner rather than later, here’s a way to celebrate by giving to nonprofit organizations that support gardening, nature, historical landscapes and flowers:
Chris Lambton, host of HGTV’s “Growing Yard,” came to Evanston on Nov. 3 as, one might say, a working guest. Slated to be the keynote speaker at GROW, the fundraiser for Random Acts of Flowers (RAF) that evening, Mr. Lambton met with staff and residents of Dobson Plaza to create a concept design for an enabling garden.
A blue spruce tree, some yews, and a short lawn comprise the little green space at this health-care and rehabilitation residence at 120 Dodge Ave.
Within a few months, that space will be transformed: After listening to the residents, Mr. Lambton came up with plans to beautify the space with flowering shrubs and bulbs and engage the residents through an accessible path to an enabling garden of raised beds.
When celebrity landscaper Chris Lambton joined us for GROW – a series of events benefiting Random Acts of Flowers’ branches across the country – we knew that his presence would add some stardust to the occasion. What none of us realized, however, is what an impact Chris’s participation in the RAF mission – arranging bouquets and delivering them to hospitals and healthcare facilities coast-to-coast – would have on him. As he and his lovely wife Peyton eagerly await the arrival of their first child (due any day now), the experience gave Chris a chance to think about the impact flowers have had in his own life, as well as experience the joy of delivering hope and encouragement first-hand .
What motivated you to take to the road for two weeks for GROW at a time when you own family was about to grow significantly with the birth of your first child?
(Laughs sheepishly) Have you ever been around woman in her ninth month of pregnancy? The emotional swings were getting pretty unpredictable!
No, seriously, I have known and worked with Cindy McConkey Cox when she was Scripps Networks, the parent company of HGTV and DIY Network. She’s now the COO at Random Acts of Flowers, and once she shared with me the mission, I was in.
It resonated with me and my own experience as my mother battled MLS. My mom was a gardener and loved flowers. So when her health really started to decline and it was hard for her to putter in her garden any more, one of her friends brought her a bouquet every week, and I saw how much that meant to her. After Mom passed, her friend continued to bring a bouquet to my dad and my brothers and me for the next six months, and it was an important part of our healing process.
All that is to say I know the impact flowers can have on someone’s emotional health and well-being.
What did you do at each of the branch locations?
I was the guest speaker at the GROW fundraising events, but really they allowed me to be part of the mission. So of course I met donors and sponsors. But the fun part was going into their workshops and arranging flowers alongside their volunteers and even better was going on the deliveries. I delivered bouquets to hospital patients in Tampa Bay, people fighting Parkinson’s Disease in Knoxville, veterans in Silicon Valley and the elderly in a low-income senior care facility in Chicago.
Was there a favorite moment for you?
I really loved spending time with the volunteers. Random Acts of Flowers does its mission with thousands of volunteers who love what they do, working with the flowers and spreading hope and encouragement to those who are most vulnerable in their communities. But the deliveries. Wow! Every one of them was different. But the one thing that was the same – and the thing that I won’t forget – was how much it meant to each person I sat with and handed a bouquet to know that some stranger, someone they’ve never met, cared enough to bring a little joy into their day.
Editor’s Note: On November 22nd, Chris and his wife Peyton welcomed their daughter, Lyla, into the world. All of us at Random Acts of Flowers send our heartfelt congratulations!
Today, as the RAF branches across the country deliver patriotic bouquets, adorned with the American Flag, to VA homes across the nation, the quote above (by ancient Roman Senator Publius Cornelius Tacitus) rings especially true to all of us here.
We take great pride in our mission of delivering hope and encouragement to individuals in healthcare facilities throughout the country, every week of the year. But, today of all days is special. Today, we deliver flowers to brave men and women who – through their military service – brought hope to us as citizens of the USA. So, yes, today we deliver hope; but along with that hope, we deliver deep, abiding gratitude to the people we met.
Thank you to those we honor today for your service, for your patriotism, and for the hope that you’ve given us as a nation.
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“Your thoughtfulness reflects the concern that you feel for our Veterans and for the service they provided to all of us while in service to our country. Without your support, we could not provide for activities like this that make hospitalization more bearable. Your thoughtfulness also reflects the concern and compassion that our community feels for our Veterans.” – Nathan, Tampa Bay Healthcare Partner
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In Chicago, we partnered with Y.O.U. (Youth & Opportunity United) and AmeriCorps to deliver bouquets to more than 500 veteran patients; and, Dare2tri’s Melissa Stockwell joined Random Acts of Flowers Chicago for a Veterans Day delivery! Stockwell lost her leg in Iraq in 2004 after a roadside bomb went off. After a year at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, she went on to win several Paratriathlons and, on September 11, 2016, she won a Bronze Medal in the Rio Paralympic Games.
On her Facebook page, Stockwell shared this quotation in honor of Veterans Day –
“A Veteran is an ordinary and yet an extraordinary human being – a person who offered some of their life’s most vital years in the service of this country, and who sacrificed their ambitions so others would not have to sacrifice theirs. A soldier and a savior and a sword against the darkness, and nothing more than the finest, greatest testimony on behalf of the finest, greatest nation ever known. So remember, each time you see someone who has served our country, just lean over and say Thank You. That’s all most people need, and in most cases it will mean more than any medals they could have been awarded or were awarded.“
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“Your Random Acts of Kindness improve the quality of my life while staying here at the VA Rehab Center. Your thoughtfulness brightens my room and warms my heart.” – Kimberly, Recipient
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In Knoxville, the Veterans Day delivery to Ben Atchley State Veterans Home was facilitated by Dave Penson, a regular volunteer at the branch and a veteran himself. He served 22 years (was commissioned out of college in 1971) before retiring. Part of a robust military family (including his father, his wife (herself a retired colonel), and their children), Dave was pleased to deliver hope and encouragement to men and women who, like him, feel taller and prouder today.
Thank you to all of our Veterans Day sponsors across the country, including Advocate Condell Medical Center; Alternative Staffing, Inc.; Dover Foundation; FTD; Functional Pathways; MZI Group; and UL.