The Bloom Project Delivers Joy at the End of Life

A room where someone is dying can be a sad place. Often, someone at the end of life does not get outside. Sometimes a person cannot move from the bed. So it is a true gift of love — and color and fragrance — when a bouquet of flowers is delivered to a patient. It brightens the room as well as the spirit.

Delivering fresh flowers to hospice and palliative care patients is what The Bloom Project does. Every week, local florists, grocers, churches, and event planners donate their slightly used flowers for reconditioning into arrangements to be delivered to hospice patients. These flowers would otherwise simply be tossed out. Area volunteers come together to repurpose and rearrange the blossoms. Social workers, clergy members, hospice workers, and other volunteers then deliver the bouquets to end-of-life patients either in a facility or at the patient’s home. Before The Bloom Project, all those slightly-used-but-still-beautiful flowers would have been tossed into the dumpster.

Flower Power at its Best

As of the end of February 2019, more than 116,000 hours of volunteer time have been spent picking up the flowers from donors and venues, re-purposing, arranging, transporting, and delivering them. Hundreds of generous business and property owners have provided space, equipment, transportation, utilities, and vases so that volunteers can put together the bouquets. To date, more than 244,000 bouquets have been delivered to grateful patients.

Heidi Berkman
Founder and president of The Bloom Project
Credit: thebloomproject.com

The Bloom Project is an Oregon-based nonprofit organization, founded by Heidi Berkman. Heidi loves flowers. She also knew how it felt to have a loved one in hospice care. Her belief that flowers should not be wasted when there were so many people who would benefit from them caused her to start The Bloom Project.

As Kelley Bishop, one of the volunteers said, “It gives me great joy. You can’t wheel in buckets of flowers and not be happy. It just fills me with happiness, and I know it makes these people happy.”

The joy for the patients comes not just from the beauty of the arrangement itself, but also from the fragrance. Sometimes a particular scent, like that of lilac or rose, evokes good memories. One 90-year-old patient in hospice care at Hickey House said that she likes to look at her arrangement because it reminds her of sunshine.

But it’s not just the color and smell of the flowers that matter. It’s the fact that the patients feel like the outside can come in when flowers are present. It’s the fact that one of the remaining days of their lives feels special because they got a gift. Most of all, it’s the fact that the patients feel like someone out there really cares about them.

The Bloom Project saves flowers from being discarded before their time. It brings joy to volunteers. It delivers color and light and love to end-of-life patients.

Whether it’s flowers for Algernon, Alice, Edward, Amy, or Oliva, the Bloom Project delivers a worthwhile gift – comfort for those who need it.