Keeper of Kindness: Maggie Hartman

Every once in a while, someone comes along whose heart and story changes your own. 

Maggie Hartman has left a beautiful mark on my heart and I expect she’ll do the same for you. 

For nearly ten years, Maggie has been selling flowers to raise money to buy Christmas gifts for those in need in her community.  Last year, she donated over 550 presents to people in her community who wouldn’t otherwise receive a holiday gift. 

Maggie just turned fifteen.   

Your math is correct: Maggie has been growing and selling flowers since she was five years old. 

Maggie shares, “I started my business when I was 5 years old because I wanted to go hang gliding on a family vacation to North Carolina later that year. It would cost $100 for me to go and my parents didn’t have that money just for me. We started brainstorming ways that I could make enough money to go. I always loved getting flowers when my Mom, Grandma and I would go to the farmers market, so we decided that I could sell flowers. My Papa made me a flower stand and we put it outside of our house. That year, I made $200 so my Dad and I went hang gliding with my Papa. The next year, I loved growing and selling flowers and I wanted to do something meaningful with the proceeds. That’s how we came up with the idea to buy gifts for kids in need.”

That year, Maggie bought 30 toys and adopted one family through a local food pantry. Since then, she has continued growing flowers to purchase Christmas gifts for those in need. 

Last year was Maggie’s ninth year raising money with her flowers and buying gifts for others. In addition to her local food pantry, she now also provides for a local nursing home, a mobile food pantry, her entire school district and 3 local families she adopts who could use the help during Christmas time. 

Maggie supports two events with her school district.  At the first event, principals at all 12 schools in the district extend an invitation: parents who could use some extra help during Christmas are invited to shop from donated gifts, picking out a present for each of their children.   

Later in the season, Maggie supports the second gift drive when High School Students in need are invited to come pick out presents for their entire family.

But Maggie’s generosity doesn’t stop there.  Each holiday, Maggie receives wish lists from the resident’s at her local nursing home.  She uses the funds she raised selling flowers to shop for special gifts for each resident.  Then, she hand delivers every gift during the annual Christmas party at the home.  

Maggie shares, “I have been purchasing gifts for them for six years and I have been able to have a relationship with a lot of them. I see them at Christmas time and I also see them during the summer when I pass out flower bouquets to them.” 

Throughout the summer, Maggie grows flowers in gardens at her family’s home. She currently has  eight different gardens, with hopes and plans to expand even more this summer. While she grows an abundance of perennials and annuals, she admits that dahlias are her favorite.  

And it’s because of dahlias that Maggie and the Growing Kindness project are now connected.  After a tough winter, Maggie shared on social media that she’d lost all of her dahlia tubers.  We knew the beautiful work Maggie was doing in her community and immediately send her a box of dahlia tubers to get her back up and running. 

Maggie sells her flowers at six different roadside stands, various markets, through subscription orders, special event flowers in her community of Dorr, Michigan.  She also provides flowers all season long for her local Chick-Fil-A. Each week, Maggie includes a specially tagged “Growing Kindness” bouquet in her stands and markets.  Anyone who finds the bouquet is asked to give it someone who could use some extra kindness that day. 

In addition to her flower business and generous gifting, Maggie manages to not only keep up, but excel at school.  Though just starting high school this year, she’s already taking honors level classes along with Advanced Placement US History. Her dream is to go to HOPE college in Holland MI to become a high school or middle school history teacher. 

She admits its a lot of work to do all that she does,  but also believes its worth every bit of effort. “It’s definitely a lot of work to run a business and go to school, but I always think about all of the people who will have a better Christmas and it motivates me to keep going even when I’m super tired. Maggie’s Flowers has changed my life in so many ways. I would not be the same person if I didn’t do Maggie’s Flowers. I’ve had so many incredible opportunities to make people’s lives better and it has truly made my life better too.”

Maggie is proving that we kindness knows no age or no bounds.  Thank you, Maggie, for renewing our hope in tomorrow, demonstrating how to lead with kindness. 

To learn more about Maggie’s story or to make a donation to her business, please visit @maggies_flowers or www.maggiesflowers.org.

Growing Kindness, Stem by Stem

During the World Wars, the answer to our country’s food shortages and low morale was the Victory Garden: small gardens grown in backyards and city lots that enabled any one person to feed their family and their community.  They were a real, tangible way to contribute.

Now a days we don’t worry so much about food shortage, and while it’s certainly arguable that many people still don’t have access to enough healthy food, I’d argue that we have an even more critical shortage these days: connection.  Real, meaningful connection.

Our world is moving faster than it ever has, with more ways for us to connect than ever before.  We’ve all got hundreds of friends online and are a member of more online groups than we can count.  And yet we’re more disconnected than we’ve ever been. While social media is powerful tool, it isn’t as powerful as real connections; the kind that help us relate and interact with communities, neighbors, friends and even family.

We believe the answer to our current deficit is still found in a backyard garden.  What would happen if we each grew a few flowers, simply for the purpose of sharing with others?  What if we literally grew connection in our communities by walking across the street or down to the local retirement center to hand a neighbor a bunch of flowers?  Growing up, my dad always told us, “Little by little, we go far.” (He still reminds me of that

How it started

As long as we’ve been growing flowers, we’ve enjoyed gifting and sharing them.  But you could say the Growing Kindness project started with a problem. We were in our first season growing cut flowers for market and we had a problem: we’d invested in hundreds of dahlia plants and had way more flowers than we could sell.  So we started sharing them in our community, by the bouquet, bucketful and even wagon-full at times. We left them on bus station benches, doctor’s office counters and libraries. We visited long term care and retirement homes. No matter where or how we shared flowers the results were always the same: always smiles. And hugs, conversation and cheer.

We were hooked.  The more we grew and gave, the more we began to see that not only could we get flowers into the hands of those who needed them, we were in a unique position to empower others in our community to do the same. So last spring we opened our farm and gave away hundreds of dahlia tubers to kind-hearted, caring souls who wanted to join us in #growingkindness in our communities, one bloom, bunch or bouquet at a time.

The response was nothing short of inspiring. It was a ripple effect and inspired us to find ways to do more. This year, we’ve found even more ways to support and involve even more people, near and far, in growing and sharing flowers in their communities. I’m faced with a daunting task.) What if stem by stem, we had the chance to make a difference in others’ lives?  To grow kindness and connection? That’s exactly what we’ve set out to accomplish with the Growing Kindness Project.

Who can join?

All it takes is a little dirt and a big heart to make a difference.  Whether you’re an apartment dweller with a single flower pot, a scout troop with an empty lot or a flower farmer with surplus blooms, we are here to support and guide anyone who would like to make a difference through flowers in their community.

We’d love nothing more than to link arms with YOU and help this project spread to your community!

Can you just imagine how many lives we could touch when we each step out bravely in kindness?  This truly is a humble, grass roots project. There is nothing new or fancy about it. The idea is simple: grow some flowers then share them with someone you know needs some extra kindness. That’s it. That’s Growing Kindness.

You certainly don’t need to be on a team to grow a garden and share flowers. But we also know that everything is better together. When you’re a member of the team, we’re here helping you with practical gardening tips and advice. We’ll also be cheering for you helping you stay inspired and encouraged to get out in your community and sprinkle kindness like confetti.

Registration for Growing Kindness Ambassadors and Growing Kindness Gardeners will be opening in January. We hope you’ll join us in your corner of the world. Together, we can do so much.