The Bloom Project and the Rose Festival: Working Together for Good

written by Isaac Peterson

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The Bloom Project is a volunteer-driven nonprofit in Portland whose mission is to provide fresh floral bouquets to hospice and palliative care patients. This year the Rose Festival Court Princesses visited the Bloom Project’s facilities at Teufel Holly Farms to process flowers and arrange them into bouquets to be delivered to the Randall Children’s Hospital.

“We are thrilled to have these young women and role models volunteer with us at the Bloom Project,” said Heidi Berkman, founder and president of The Bloom Project. “We could not be more excited to show the community the impact flowers can make for local families.”

The Bloom Project has also been selected as the official charity partner of the 2017 Portland Rose Festival. As part of this partnership, Berkman and her team of volunteers will look to help the Portland Rose Festival repurpose many of the 71,000 stems of flowers from the Spirit Mountain Casino Grand Floral Parade as gifts for selected organizations.

“Our respective missions and activities align so perfectly and offer many opportunities to work together this spring and summer,” says Marilyn Clint, Rose Festival Chief Operating Officer. “We see a lot of synergy between our organizations and we look forward to planning some new mission-based projects this season.”

The Bloom Project receives each of its flowers from donations provided by wholesale floral companies, growers and local grocery stores. Volunteers repurpose the flowers to create beautiful bouquets, ready to deliver to local hospice and palliative care patients. In the organization’s 10 years, it has distributed more than 170,000 bouquets with 75,000 donated volunteer hours.