As the perfect end to a flower-filled year, last week I had the great pleasure to organize a flower donation and arranging workshop at a Helsinki elderly care facility.
Inspired by great organizations like The Bloom Project, Random Acts of Flowers, the idea was to collect surplus flowers after Christmas (when both florists and wholesalers are offloading a lot of stock); and to turn them into beautiful arrangements to brighten someone’s day. We also took a leaf out of Sarah von Pollaro’s book at Flower Empowered and not only donated the flowers, but also ran an arranging workshop for the residents.
On Thursday, December 27, 9 volunteers came to Kukkatoimitus (a Helsinki-based flower wholesaler) to process donated flowers and pre-make some of the arrangements.
Then on Friday, December 28, 11 of us went to the care facility to drop off the donations and help the residents arrange their own bouquets.
When the flowers arrived on Friday, the volunteers got busy delivering the pre-made arrangements; and setting out the loose flowers for the workshop. We took over a nursing station and converted it to a “flower shop” where folks could come through and select the flowers they wanted to put into their bouquet – then each person sat with a volunteer who helped make their arrangement.
Thanks to the generosity of Kukkatoimitus (which provided the lions share of the flower donations, as well as the logistics to transport the flowers), we had so many flowers that the care facility staff also got to take home flowers.
In total, over 1600 flowers were donated and turned into over 80 beautiful bouquets.
Hopefully this is the first of many such projects, because more than a few of us were shedding tears of joy on the delivery day! If you’d like to hear about upcoming events, check out our Flower Rescue page on Facebook.
And a very special thanks to Kukkatoimitus for sponsoring the event; and to Saravanan Duraisamy and Sini Yli-Opas for the photos!
Kati Mayfield 