One of our key goals at Institute, is to empower local creatives. Olivia Fletcher talks about our work together with Crochyay and encouraging random acts of kindness…

“In 2019, after struggling with my own mental health, I decided to start a crochet kindness project, where for 100 days, I left a flower with a label attached saying ‘if you found this flower and it brings a smile to your face, feel free to take it home’ in a random location for a stranger to find. I think my goal was to prove that even a tiny act of kindness could be enough to brighten someone else's day, and that it doesn’t always have to be a grand gesture.

After I’d been doing it for a couple of months I was contacted by the BBC and they said they wanted to make a short video about what I’d been doing. This ended up getting over 2 million views and I was then overwhelmed with people contacting me asking how they can get involved with a similar project.

I started off by making a facebook group called Random Acts of Crochet Kindness (RAOCK), where people could share their acts of kindness and seek support and inspiration.

From there I came up with the idea of The Flower Wall Project.

I loved the idea of there being this wall of crocheted/knitted flowers with blank labels attached, in a public space for anybody to take and pass on as an act of kindness. In that way, a person may leave their house with no intention of passing on an act of kindness, but if they see the wall, they may think ‘oh why not!’ and then an act of kindness is carried out that wouldn’t have been before.

Everyone is so busy in their own lives that they often don’t have the headspace to think about doing random acts of kindness, however when they see the flower wall it puts an idea in their head that wasn’t there before, and it often brings happiness to their day too.

So once this idea had firmly planted itself in my brain I had to figure out how I was going to make it work. I turned to my lovely friends for help and the RAOCK group (which by this point had 8000 members) and asked for donations of flowers, and was blown away to receive thousands of donations which I then attached blank labels to.

This is where Graffio Arts came in, they listened to me ramble on about my hopes and dreams with The Flower Wall Project and they helped me piece it together into a logical plan, even inspiring me with ideas I never would have thought of alone, and reassured me that it was all achievable.

Working with Graffio Arts has been so empowering, they didn’t just do everything for me, they taught me how to do it myself, from building the flower wall, to learning how to take it further.

When I was on my own, I felt like the Flower Wall was so far fetched, and probably never going to happen, but now with Graffio Arts’ support and the RAOCK group (which now has 18,000 members!) I’m allowing myself to dream even more about where it could go.

COVID 19 has hit everyone hard and I know there must be so many people feeling lonely and isolated, so the next goal is to take The Flower Wall Project online, where you can send a random flower to a friend or family member with a handwritten label and you just pay for postage.

In the future I would love to set up support groups where everyone comes together to talk about how they’re doing whilst crocheting flowers for the wall, and even lead workshops teaching crochet so I can hopefully inspire more people to get involved with the crochet kindness movement!”