With one of our amazing clients having to cancel their wedding celebration the week of –– and needing to reschedule our own personal yearly floral gathering with DC area planners #srvflowerhoopla –– we had thousands of stems of flowers that would go completely to waste this week.
Easiest and very doable solution would have been to make arrangements or flower bouquets and pass them out to the general public, or work with an awesome floral donation non-profit to see them brighten someone’s day! But then it dawned on us that we could perhaps SELL the flowers to not ONLY brighten someone’s day, but to also gather funds that we could then distribute BACK into the community to make an even bigger impact! Food banks are top of mind for us right now, so we quickly started promoting over Instagram and with the help of everyone we know who actively shared our goal –– we ended up raising nearly $7,000 in just an hour and a half!
We created a pop-up drive-thru flower fundraiser! Made a little stand and pulled out nearly 150 arrangements to sell to passing cars! We had a long string of cars lined up through our parking lot, safely instructing from their windows and popping their trunk to allow us to place an arrangement safely inside their vehicle. We also had the help of our dear flower friends Kate from Floret & Vine and Haylie from Wander and Whimsy who also had canceled events and brought over all their bucket of blooms which allowed us to make even more pieces than we would have been able to!
ALL FUNDS have gone to support DC Dream Center –– who is serving hot meals and stocking basic essentials to those finding themselves unexpectedly in need during this time in DC’s Ward 7!
VIEW THE FEATURED SEGMENT ON ABC7 here.
AND NOW! ––– after selling out so fast, we sent out some feelers to our favorite go-to wholesalers who IMMEDIATELY jumped on board and are now sending THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS of stems of flowers and greens for us to tackle tomorrow!
We have several local designers coming to help us (keeping the number of people in the studio low and working at separate stations) to try and whip out at least 300 designs to provide to another string of cars!
Join us if you can on Thursday, March 19th from 2:00pm to 4:00pm (while supplies last) to pick up as many arrangements as you’d like! We’ve set a minimum donation amount of $35 per arrangement and you can venmo your donation to us @sweetrootvillage (Lauren Anderson) and enter “0326” if you are prompted for the last four of a phone number.
And if you are far away and cannot pick up a flower arrangement, you can STILL VENMO and contribute to our community. Or donate directly! We’ll be supporting Food for Others this time around who is a local Virginia food bank that feeds over 2,000 families daily!
Grateful to everyone who has donated so far and attended our flower drive-thru! Thank you to ABC7 for spreading the love. Thank you to the lovely lady who called in to WGTS 91.9 radio station to share what we were up to and to every person spreading the word and helping us expand our reach to bring in more support for a very worth cause. You are all the reason that this is even possible for us.
