Written by Growing Kindness Ambassador Leahy Meyring
2022 Growing Kindness Project Ambassador Jenn Koym of Fern Creek Florals has a unique insight into the needs of families with children in hospital care. Her own experience of having a child who needed hospital care led Jenn to a unique way of sharing flowers in her community. Her story serves as a reminder that our life experiences often help us to see needs in our community that others may not see.
Jenn’s journey to sharing flowers began far from her home in Virginia. When her daughter needed heart surgery in Boston, the hospital did not have housing available for their family. Hospitality Homes in Boston connected Jenn’s family with a host family in the area, allowing them to stay close to their daughter while she was in the hospital. When Jenn’s family returned home to Charlottesville, VA, Jenn saw the same need there. Families were having to sleep in their cars because there wasn’t enough patient housing available. This prompted her to start a non-profit organization called Lily Pads Housing in Charlottesville, Virginia. Lily Pads connects people who have space in their homes or rental properties with families who have children in the pediatric hospital.
During the Covid-19 pandemic Jenn was unable to meet Lily Pads families in the hospital as she had prior to the pandemic. Her one connection with the families was when she met them outside the hospital with a bouquet of flowers from her garden. The feedback was overwhelming. The families spoke of how healing it was to have flowers in the hospital rooms or where they were staying. Jenn saw how meaningful the flowers were to the families and wanted to expand her giving beyond the families she knew through Lily Pads Housing. She decided to deliver flowers to the pediatric hospital weekly so that the volunteer services department of the hospital could deliver them to families with children in the hospital. “Our family spent a lot of time in the hospital because our daughter had a heart defect and I know how special it is to get those little random acts of kindness and those little gestures. It means the world when you’re going through a really difficult time. I just wanted to pay it forward,” she shared.
Jenn knew she’d need help if she was going to share bouquets weekly. Thankfully Charlottesville has an active gardening group on Facebook. Jenn reached out to this group, explained that she was a Growing Kindness Project Ambassador and her vision. She asked for volunteers who would be willing to help her and experienced a wonderful outpouring of donations of both vases and flowers. She now volunteers who wash and drop off vases at her house. Another group drops off flowers from their gardens on Sunday. On Monday an additional group of volunteers gathers on her porch to arrange the flowers in vases and then loads up the flowers in Jenn’s car. She then drops them off with the volunteer services department at the pediatric hospital. Almost every hospital has a volunteer services department and Jenn recommends contacting them prior to arriving at a hospital with flowers. Each week her team of volunteers donates between 10 and 30 arrangements to their local pediatrics hospital, depending on how many flowers are available.
It can feel overwhelming, Jenn noted, to harvest, arrange and deliver flowers all in one day, but breaking up the process has made it manageable. “It helps having a team that comes to you and having other local gardeners who enjoy helping,” she said. Jenn found that the connection that has developed is two-fold. There is a connection with the families that receive the flowers, but there is also connection with the people who pull together to make the bouquets. The volunteers arranging flowers also get to share and enrich their own gardening knowledge. “It becomes an educational experience as well. It’s a nice time for people who have grown flowers to share their tips about plants. It’s a way to connect with people who have a love and passion for growing flowers and serving in the community,” she shared.
Creating connections is a high priority for Jenn and she has found the Growing Kindness Project to be a very supportive community. “It’s great to be able to ask questions and it’s been so nice to be able to troubleshoot with other people and have access to people who are growing on a larger scale and who have more experience. Through the Ambassador program and the quarterly get-togethers I’ve created some really strong friends who I call or FaceTime with when I have an issue in the garden or I need to troubleshoot something. A lot of this is very new to me, scaling up and growing flowers en masse. Having this organization supporting you 100% of the way to help you be successful is amazing. I’m doing this on a very small scale, but when you connect it with all these other people across the world that are doing this too, it’s this huge ripple effect that is really phenomenal when you think about it.” Jenn really encourages anyone thinking about becoming a part of the Growing Kindness Project to join and benefit from the support provided by the Growing Kindness Project community in growing and sharing flowers. As a Growing Kindness Project Ambassador, she participates in Ambassador meetings. She shared, “It’s been such a wonderful thing to connect with this organization and be an Ambassador this year. And I cry every meeting when I hear the stories of people seeing the needs in their community and are filling it. It’s so beautiful,”
Growing Kindness Project founder Deanna Kitchen encourages people with these words: “Your vision of the ways you can impact your community is powerful. Hold tight to that because not everybody sees what you see. Reach out and ask people to come alongside you. We’re so much better together.” Jenn’s story of sharing flowers in her community is an example of those principles in action.
**We’re deeply grateful to GK Ambassador Alumni, Leah Meyring for writing this article, based on a live interview with GK founder, Deanna Kitchen and Jen. If you’d like, you can view the recording of the full interview here.
