While dozens of roses were delivered to lovestruck students on Valentine’s Day, there’s one Knoxville organization that’s been delivering flowers all year long.

Random Acts of Flowers is a charity organization that takes donated flowers and re-purposes them into “new” bouquets. These bouquets are then delivered to places like hospitals, nursing homes and hospice care centers.

“We’re basically a charity that takes what would likely be garbage and we turn it into a smile,” said Larsen Jay, the founder and executive director of Random Acts of Flowers.

The process of making new bouquets from old ones starts when the donated flowers — which come from places like weddings, funerals and overstocked florist shops — come to a central processing site. They’re then broken down into individual pieces. The flowers that are damaged or have begun to wilt are thrown out. The flowers that still look good are then gathered and reorganized into new arrangements.

Jay said that artificial flowers are also accepted. These flowers are used when recipients have either an immunity or allergy condition that would hinder them from receiving a bouquet made of real flowers. The time lapse from receiving the donated flowers to shipping them to their intended recipient usually takes between 24 to 48 hours.

Once the flowers are delivered, Random Acts of Flowers receives a list put together by the caregivers that tells them which people to give the re-purposed bouquets to.

“The beauty of the program is that we don’t know who’s going to get the flowers,” Jay explained. “We simply make as many (bouquets) as we possibly can … and when we get there we simply get a list of room numbers.”

Jay said that the caretakers’ list is created based on who the caretakers think really could use an extra smile.

“They’ve gone around to the nurses and the caregivers and said, ‘Okay, who needs a pick me up? Who needs a touch point? Maybe who hasn’t had a visitor? … Who’s nervous about an upcoming procedure?'” Jay said.

“Whatever the case may be, it doesn’t matter to us. When we get that list of rooms, we know that that’s a room that has been identified by somebody on the staff as somebody who needs a smile,” he added.

The idea for Random Acts of Flowers originated about five years ago when Jay fell from a ladder that had crumbled underneath him, causing him to plummet nearly two stories before landing face-first on the concrete below.

After getting out of the trauma ward at the UT Medical Center, Jay soon found himself swamped with flowers. But it was after receiving so many bouquets that the idea for the future charity lit in Jay’s mind.

“When I was going through the halls at the end of the first week, I just noticed how many other rooms around me had no flowers, no plants, no visitors and really no life,” Jay recalled. “And it seemed obvious what we had to do.”

What Jay had to do was go and start taking off the tags from his many flowers, load them onto a wheelchair and deliver them from room to room.

Jay enjoyed the experience of donating the flowers and wondered if there was an organization doing a similar activity. After some research, however, he realized that there weren’t any organizations that distributed flowers on a large scale. Thus, Jay took it upon himself to start Random Acts of Flowers.

It has been growing steadily ever since. During his first year, Jay said Random Acts of Flowers made about 50 to 150 donations a month. During their second year, 200 to 250 donations were made a month. The third year saw an increase of 300 to 350 donations a month.

But then during the past fourth year, Jay said their donations have jumped to 600 to 800 a month. Not only that, but Random Acts of Flowers now has more than 130 sources for donated flowers, a huge leap from the eight spots they had when they first started.

“Really it comes down to the more flowers we get in the door, the more we can process, the more we can deliver,” Jay said. “… But it’s all across the board, it’s just gone crazy for the past year or so.”

Organizing and delivering those donations is a fleet of around 300 volunteers, including Scott Haefer. A senior marketing and logistics double major at UT, Haefer began volunteering with Random Acts of Flowers in December.

His interest was piqued when Jay, a UT alumnus on both undergrad and graduate level, came into his Management 402 class to discuss the Random Acts of Flowers organization and how it originated. The presentation left an impression on Haefer.

“He talked about his mission and how he got it started up,” Haefer recalled. “So from there I got on their website … and decided I’d give it a try. First day in, I liked it and liked the people there. I’ve been there since then.”

Haefer volunteers about once a week for approximately two hours. He said that he tends to do any number of odd jobs that might be needed, such as cleaning and transporting heavy materials. But for him, the best part is doing what he can to help bring a smile on people’s faces.

“Some people in nursing homes, I’m sure receive flowers all the time, and then you have people who don’t have as many relatives or close family members to bring them flowers,” Haefer said. “And I feel like those people just appreciate getting something, or they probably appreciate that contact of when that person comes in to delivery the flowers … just getting the chance to talk to them for a few minutes when they’re in there.”

For Jay, who has helped deliver many bouquets since that first trip with a loaded wheelchair, that reaction is what Random Acts of Flowers is all about.

“Usually the reaction is pretty overwhelming,” he said. “People are generally overwhelmed that someone would do something nice for them for no reason. … But most of the time, the reaction is really just across-the-board genuinely overwhelmed and excited that somebody did something nice for them and brought them a smile.”

For those interested in making donations or volunteering, more information can be found at randomactsofflowers.org. Jay said that the charity is always open to receiving flowers and getting new help.

“There’s no shortage of flowers thrown away everyday and there’s no shortage of people that could use a pick-me-up,” he said.