Non profits built around love are simply the best. A non profit built around sharing flowers as signs of love and caring, and not letting beautiful blooms go to waste, is nothing short of spectacular! Your Flower Friends is a local example of recycling fresh, fragrant flowers used in weddings and events, and repurposing those flora and fauna to brighten the days of people in nursing homes, hospitals, children’s hospitals, care centers, and more.
Andrea Taylor and her daughter, Claire, envisioned a way in which the perfectly good flowers leftover from weddings and events in the Kansas City area could be donated, redesigned, and delivered to brighten the lives of others. They bring volunteers together to pick up donated flowers, deliver them to be rearranged in lovely vases, add a little creativity and elbow grease, and make them into touching bouquets of posies to be delivered the following day. The business model is brilliant: give flowers a second life, reduce waste, increase recycling, and bring a moment of comfort, beauty, and human connection.
Claire, a K-State student, originally created the concept and pitched it to her mom, who is retired from a long and successful career in commercial insurance. Andrea is the spreadsheet lady, good with budgets and business plans, and she probably wasn’t completely happy with having more free time than she was used to.
In March of 2026, the pair started their 501(c)(3), and Your Flower Friends was born. The two are working on fundraising, of course, and finding volunteers and flower donors. The volunteer part is a bit tricky, someone has to be willing to do a bloom pick-up at random, often late in the evening when an event or a wedding is over and the teardown has begun. The flowers must be transported, kept in water and cool, and then rearranged into separate bouquets in donated vases and containers. From there, decisions must be made about where the flowers will go, when they will be delivered, and who will deliver them.
What the organization needs now is donations. Money, naturally helps. But they also need people to think about the events they are involved in, and create flower donations from those events. They also need simple things like vases and containers, and of course, volunteers. The organization is in need of recognition and a public understanding of the importance of this type of recycling. It’s not just about saving the flowers and reducing the waste. It’s about putting smiles on the faces of those who don’t expect a fresh, thoughtfully presented bouquet of flowers. The colors, the scents, the pleasure of a divine arrangement sent with love, that is the real reason Andrea and Claire do the hard work. Recycling natural beauty with love is really a calling for this mother/daughter duo, and we salute their ingenuity and moxie. For more information, visit yourflowerfriends.org.
Featured in the October 3, 2026 issue of The Independent.
By Anne Potter Russ
