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Kristin Taylor, Perenity volunteer (left) and Harriet Karro, founder Perenity-Nashville

Even though Harriet Karro hopes for vases and roses, and Greg Cox needs anesthesia machines and centrifuges, their purposes are the same.

Both lead teams of dedicated volunteers who take "recycling" to a new level — bringing added purpose to beautiful celebratory flowers and "repositioning" basic medical supplies that have been around the block, saving them all from the landfill to cure or comfort once more.

Perenity

Karro transplanted the idea of the Perenity Flower Ministry to Nashville when she moved here in 2004 from Birmingham. Conceived by avid Birmingham gardeners as a way to share their garden with others, over the years it has inspired the donation of flowers from the community-at-large. Perenity is a hybrid of the words 'perennial' and 'eternity'.

Thanks to Karro's tireless efforts, Perenity-Nashville has taken root as a way to serve patients of Alive Hospice. However, during "flower floods" there are more flowers than Alive Hospice can absorb and arrangements are expanded and delivered to other not-for-profits in the Nashville area: Meals on Wheels, Hospital Hospitality House, Ronald McDonald House, Joseph B. Knowles Home for the Aged, Bordeaux Long Term Care, Belcourt Terrace Nursing Home, Green Hills Rehab, and many others.

Perenity is an all-volunteer ministry that collects elaborate flower arrangements from weddings, parties, funerals and meetings and whisks them away to a tiny workshop, which itself has been "recycled" from an early 20th century pony barn.

Once they arrive, volunteers reclaim and refresh the colorful blooms, rearrange them into bedside bouquets, and deliver them to Alive Hospice or one of the other facilities to brighten the rooms and hearts of patients, their families and caregivers.

Over the past four-and-a-half years, Perenity-Nashville volunteers have created and delivered more than 14,000 arrangements. All to have gone to the goal that Karro identifies as Perenity's mission — that no flower goes by the wayside without gracing the bedside and bringing cheer to a patient.

This goal can't be achieved without the help of the many volunteers who take the steps necessary for the recirculation of nature's most ephemeral gift. Karro counts on more than 30 regular volunteers who collect flowers (often at midnight after a gala at a downtown hotel or at twilight following an afternoon wedding); rearrange and refresh the flowers in the barn; and deliver them, usually on Sundays and Mondays following weekend events.

She says she also counts on "flowery speech" to help spread the word that there is continued purpose for beautiful blooms after their debut and that they can have a new mission uplifting spirits and bringing quiet comfort.

Oh — and the vases! They could use those too!

Project Cure

Greg Cox has room for lots of items at the Clifton Avenue Distribution Warehouse for Project C.U.R.E., whose mission is to identify, solicit, collect, sort and deliver medical supplies and services according to the imperative needs of the world.

Cox, director of the Denver-based organization's Nashville Distribution Center, describes his work as dealing with "blessing challenges" … opportunities to help others by redistributing materials that can still be used for healing and medical purposes thereby eliminating waste by passing them along to medical teams in other countries who can use them.

Almost every inch of the 54,000 square foot warehouse — floor to ceiling — is filled with medical equipment, supplies and tools that have been sorted, or will be sorted, into the 140 categories Project C.U.R.E. has identified and uses to inventory items from sutures and syringes to suction tubing and surgery packs. Cox says that anything medical they "had, have or will get soon."

Supplies and equipment are loaded into 40-foot cargo containers and shipped by ocean to hospitals and clinics in developing countries from Central Asia to South America … from Africa to the Far East … and from Eastern Europe to the Caribbean. Everything is loaded by hand and packed to be "bullet proof" for the trip.

Each recipient hospital or clinic has been vetted by a Project C.U.R.E. site inspection team. The containers are addressed to a specific person in the government of the host countries who has agreed to accept responsibility for the supplies so that nothing can "slip through the cracks." Not one container has ever been lost to the black market, according to Cox.

From the tip of Maine to the tip of Florida and west to Arizona, medical supplies, often still in-date, and new, used and overstock equipment that has been restored is collected and transported to the Nashville distribution center. The supplies are usually brought gratis by trucks from WalMart or Averitt. None of this equipment and supplies can be reused in the United States and would all end up filling local landfills to overflowing.

Cox says the Nashville warehouse has a "dream team" of volunteers who know and understand medical procedures and equipment and provide invaluable help in determining what should go where. Cox depends on Sharlene Harlowe, a retired surgical RN; Vince Cowden, a retired Summit orthopedic surgeon; and Francoise Thormann, a French anesthesiologist; for expert advice.

Biomedical expert volunteers like Lyn Taylor, who repairs X-ray machines, and Phil Lapard, the wheelchair man, both "came with the building" and can be counted on to get things in working order. Cox said more than 1,000 volunteers put in some time every year.

In addition to almost every medically connected company in this healthcare capital, many other local companies have also donated services and equipment. JE Crain, Dell Computer, Hasty Plumbing, Metro RediMix, the Rogers Group, Stansell Electric, Hill-Rom, Charter Construction, Maddux Electric and Balfour-Beatty Construction, among many other Nashville corporations, have stepped forward to help the mission.

Everything that goes into a container from Nashville is the best available on hand … no matter the destination. Cox's theory is "choose to send the best of what you have — and you'll get more."

There is always a desperate need for volunteer bio-med techs and equipment, a pallet racking system and container sponsors to pay the $20,000 shipping cost for each container (donations can be made online to www.projectcure.org).

"What we are doing here is building a birthday cake backwards," Cox says.

"The candles are the incubators, ventilators, x-ray units … the icing are things like bedside monitors … and the cake is the basic supplies — diapers, blankets, needles — we need to be sure that all three parts are included in each container."

The immense warehouse is "dynamic" — volunteers are always sorting something coming in and packing things going out. Right now Cox is making room for 11 million syringes coming from a company in the southeast and preparing a shipment that includes 28 "awesome" beds donated by Saint Thomas Hospital that is headed to the First Lady of Mexico.

To find out more about other ways to help charities with a medical mission, see the related sidebar.

Tags:

Harriet Karro, Perenity, Project C.U.R.E., recycling

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