At Family First, our goal is to inspire: with recipes, tablescape designs, and, most importantly, chesed ideas. Jews are a community-minded people, and food is one (major) medium through which we promote acts of kindness, whether through meals we make for others or the simchahs we send that food to. Elevating the mundane is a job we women don’t take lightly. In the spirit of embracing that potential, we’ve highlighted two women who selflessly devote their time to doing just that: taking the ordinary and making it extraordinary.
Risa S. lives in Five Towns and created a chesed opportunity where she repurposes simchah florals from one event to another.
Where did the idea originate from?
I was helping set up someone’s vort in my shul on a Sunday. It looked great, but I felt like it was missing flowers. I remembered that I’d been to a gorgeous baby-girl kiddush that past Shabbos, and that the flowers had been amazing. Knowing the baalei simchah and what wonderful people they are, I had a sense they would be thrilled to share the flowers. Turns out, they were delighted for someone else to be able to enjoy them. That was my first time: I brought the flowers to the vort, and they really beautified the simchah. I think that I repurposed them again after that — I brought them to my aunt in a nursing home. The truth is, using flowers as a catalyst for chesed is very dear to me: I had a friend who passed away when she was very young, and she used to do Shavuos flowers to raise funds for tzedakah. It felt very appropriate to be doing this in her memory. My father passed away shortly thereafter, so I wanted to do it in his memory, too.
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