Siddhant Khandelwal was helping clean up after his cousin’s wedding when he noticed event planners throwing out the flowers his family had spent thousands of dollars on for the special occasion.
“I was left shocked because it just seemed wrong that they were all being thrown away,” Khandelwal, a Parkland High School senior, said. “The event was a day long, and so obviously, the flowers were still in pristine condition.”
Khandelwal and his family members grabbed the remaining flowers and decided to donate them to a local hospital in Texas, where the December 2021 wedding had taken place.
When he returned home to the Lehigh Valley later that month, Khandelwal, 17, was inspired to start a donation project called Bloomerang to make sure flowers don’t go to waste.
“When I saw this opportunity, I just could visualize the potential in my head and just see in my imagination how many people I could really affect from this,” he said.
Khandelwal has been collecting flowers from weddings, funerals, graduation parties and other events ever since to donate to local nursing homes, hospitals and other senior facilities.
He initially decided to donate the flowers to places where senior citizens could enjoy them because he realized they were facing increased restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I feel like everyone likes flowers, and it just makes people happier, and that’s why I decided to give it to them, in case they feel lonely,” he said.
Khandelwal recently began expanding his project to other states.
After collecting a donation from northern New York on his own, Khandelwal realized it wasn’t feasible to keep driving so far to pick up flowers.
With the help of cousins, family friends and other students he found online, Bloomerang has opened branches in New Jersey, New York, Texas, North Carolina and California since November.
“As parents, we strongly believe in community service,” Khandelwal’s father, Ashok, said. “If in the family, somebody’s happy, everybody’s happy. So if you keep expanding that idea from home, you go to your neighborhood and larger community, and from there it could keep expanding.”
Since Bloomerang was conceived more than a year ago, the initiative has resulted in 56 donations, consisting of about 11,400 flowers. Most of these donations were made to facilities in the Lehigh Valley, such as DevonHouse Senior Living in Allentown.
Melissa Bartynski, recreation director at DevonHouse, said Khandelwal dropped off 200 flowers from a weekend wedding, and she used them to decorate the common area in the assisted living facility.
“It was a conversation piece,” Bartynski said. “No one could believe they were real, because I mean, they were giant, white hydrangeas.”
“Everyone got a kick out of them,” she said. “They brightened everyone’s day. I thought it was a very ingenious idea for a young man.”
Sometimes Khandelwal is asked to leave his donation for staff to manage, but other times he gets to hand deliver flowers to the seniors, who are often in shock at seeing him.
“That’s where it really dawned on me that some of them truly felt forgotten,” he said.
Khandelwal said some of the seniors he’s spoken with have been in nursing homes for a decade or more, and they said family members don’t visit often anymore.
Khandelwal said he enjoys getting to talk with seniors on deliveries. He remembers speaking with one woman who playfully told him he was changing her perception of teenagers.
“She always hated how teenagers and younger people were always on their devices,” he recounted. “Seeing me do this gave her hope in our generation that the world wasn’t being left in the hands of phone addicts. That was funny.”
The winter is a slow time for donations, but Bloomerang will soon be getting busy as the summer approaches, with an average of two flower donations to deliver every two to three weeks.
People who want to donate flowers from an event can reach out on Bloomerang’s Twitter or Instagram accounts. They can also email Khandelwal at sid@bloomerang.org.
Khandelwal has found people to donate flowers to Bloomerang in the past through local organizations, such as the Pennsylvania Chamber of Commerce, or the Indian American Association of the Lehigh Valley.
Ashley Russo, president of ASR Media Productions in Bethlehem, has also helped Khandelwal connect with local nonprofits.
“He was pretty well connected with places who were happy to receive the flowers,” she said. “It was getting the events to donate them, and that’s hard to do if you’re not connected to the people running the events.”
Russo met Khandelwal through her volunteer work with the annual fundraising campaign for United Way of the Greater Lehigh Valley when she was attending a TeenWorks picnic last summer.
TeenWorks is a program that brings local labor union leaders and teens together to form a board that votes to award grants to community service projects.
“He and I spoke for a long time, and he told me about his initiative and what he’s working on, and it just immediately made sense to me,” Russo said, adding she couldn’t believe no one had thought of the idea sooner.
Khandelwal participates in TeenWorks and also received grants totaling $1,000 from the program to buy vases for delivering flowers and to set up his website. He also used a small portion to pay for gas, but has been funding the majority of his transportation costs with his own money.
Dean Donaher, former executive director of TeenWorks and the current relationship manager at United Way, said he sees why Khandelwal was awarded the grant money for his project.
“It was making the most of as few resources as you could,” he said of Bloomerang. “It’s an ingenious idea to recycle flowers that still have life to them. It was something that was novel.”
Khandelwal also received the TeenWorks Project of the Year Award and Zach Krauss Spirit of Service Award in January for his work through Bloomerang.
But for Khandelwal, the best reward is making seniors feel seen and remembered through his floral deliveries, he said.
“It is probably one of the greatest feelings I’ve ever felt,” he said. “Flowers are just a reminder they’re not forgotten.”
Morning Call reporter Jenny Roberts can be reached at 484-903-1732 and jroberts@mcall.com.
