Community Interest
Giving Back: Siddhant Khandelwal
Community Service in Bloom
As Parkland High School Graduate Siddhant “Sid” Khandelwal embarks on his freshman year at University of Pittsburgh, he cannot help but to be grateful for the trail of community service he has blazed, simply by making people smile. “The ability to help someone is so important,” Sid said, while adding that making someone smile is the real joy.
Sid pondered a way to create more smiles, but in a way that would make an even larger impact.
Enter Bloomerang.
Sid formed Bloomerang in 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. His mission was to create smiles with the power of flowers. Bloomerang takes donations of used flowers from business and community functions, upcycling them to create new arrangements that are personally delivered to senior living facilities and hospitals. “It kind of clicked to me, why not take the flowers that were wasted at so many events and donate them to hospitals and retirement facilities where people need them the most,” Sid said.
To date, Bloomerang has delivered almost 30,000 flowers to 70 facilities, upcycling over $130,000 flowers in total.
As Sid now looks to prepare for Bloomerang’s future, he has begun encouraging students in other states to open new branches of Bloomerang so it can become a nationwide endeavor. “The goal is to somehow get it running on its own,” Sid said. In the meantime, Sid savors the joy that his life of community stewardship has given him. “It brings this happiness in you that you can’t obtain from anywhere else.”
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