PROVIDENCE – More often than not, Destenie Vital, What Cheer Flower Farm’s executive director, would be out and about delivering flowers to help needy individuals, such as veterans, senior citizens, those dealing with food insecurity and homelessness, cope with various stresses in everyday life.
During her deliveries, she would notice that the food shelves Vital and her What Cheer staff deliver to are adjacent to schools. Also, on a given day, Vital would see children pass by the nonprofit’s flower farm. Then it dawned on her: The organization didn’t initially think to expand its flower program offered to adults to children.
“I’d figured that if the adults we’re serving are in stressful situations, then the kids would also be stressed,” especially from the COVID-19 pandemic, Vital told Providence Business News on Monday.
A new program What Cheer is launching will soon help children cope with various stresses, and it now has some solid financial backing. The organization’s idea took top billing in the United Way of Rhode Island’s and Social Enterprise Greenhouse’s 2021 Nonprofit Innovation Lab.
What Cheer’s idea to educational programming for children through flowers earned the organization $50,000 during the lab’s SPARKED! final pitch competition. The lab, itself – created in 2020 – helps organizations accelerate their abilities to create ideas to make a social impact.
The goal of What Cheer’s idea, Vital said, is to have the children both learn about flowers and eventually take the flowers home to “decorate their space” to relieve them of stresses and anxiety, as well as to “brighten the day.”
“Flowers have that effect on people,” she said. “If you give them flowers, it makes everything better.”
Vital said a pilot program in delivering flowers to children was established through Family Service of Rhode Island’s AmeriCorps Attendance Improvement Matters initiative. What Cheer has recently delivered flowers to teachers at Mary E. Fogarty Elementary School. That school, she said, will receive the flowers first to understand how to handle them before expanding the program.
Everyone in the school from the first flower delivery will get a bouquet to take home as an introduction to flowers, she said. From there, teachers, based on needs, will request a certain amount of flowers for a specific age-appropriate lesson.
“For a kindergartener, [flowers] could be a color lesson. For fifth-graders, that could be a science lesson or geography lesson because some of the flowers … come from Ecuador and the Netherlands,” Vital said. “It will help teachers innovate in the classroom as needed.”
Vital said What Cheer is looking into expanding the program beyond Providence. She said the organization is currently speaking with another organization to bring the program to Central Falls and launch it within the next month.
“We want to be of service,” Vital said. “We want the community to tell us what they need, and we want to supply the flowers for their needs for the kids.”
Also during the pitch contest, Woonsocket-based Community Care Alliance earned a $25,000 award for its plan to train individuals in all aspects of running a business via STARCleaning, a cleaning service focused on environmentally friendly strategies.
Spectrum Theatre Ensemble in Providence earned a $15,000 prize to help create a program to standardize and codify sensory-friendly practices to better serve Neuro-diverse audiences.
Women’s Fund of Rhode Island in Providence received a $5,000 Public Choice Award for its vision to establish a nonpartisan support initiative for newly elected and appointed women in local government to build communication skills.
James Bessette is the PBN special projects editor, and also covers the nonprofit and education sectors. You may reach him at Bessette@PBN.com. You may also follow him on Twitter at @James_Bessette.
