Megan McDowell acutely knows the awful sinking sensation that accompanies a traumatic life event. After her beloved brother-in-law, John W. Farrell perished on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center on 9-11, she and her family fell into a spiral of disbelief, grief and shock.
“John met my older sister, Maryanne, at Bernardsville High School, when I was 7 and got married right after college. I’ve known him my entire life,” McDowell says. “There are no words to describe the agony and numbness of that first year. It was an impossible task to try to explain what had happened to him to his four children.”
However, McDowell also remembers something else during that dark time: An abundance of kindness from friends, neighbors and complete strangers. Meals were delivered for months. Neighbors raked leaves. Mothers offered to carpool Maryanne’s four children to activities. “The world showed up for us. While everyone else may remember 9-11 by images of crashing planes and burning buildings, my nieces and nephews have memories of teddy bears made from their father’s shirts, games and candy being delivered to the front door, and hugs whenever they left the house,” she says. “Every time someone did even a small act of kindness, it was like a salve on the grief. When you are in deep loss, you need elevated love.”
McDowell, a social worker and licensed therapist, started thinking: When we have our feet solidly on the ground again, I would spend the rest of my life paying forward all the kindness shown to my family. “I wanted to channel the sense of giving and caring for each other that we had after 9-11. People live every day with private struggles. I wanted to create a way of life that encouraged people to pay closer attention to these struggles and to the power of healing available through the cycle of receiving and giving,” she says.
In 2003, McDowell started gathering monthly with friends over wine, cheese and crackers to discuss how they could start using their talents to help others in the community struggling with grief, illness, or an acute life situation as her family was helped. “A mother with cancer, for example, wouldn’t have the energy to plant a garden, but someone who liked gardening could do it for her. Or if there was a child who was sick and loved chocolate chip cookies, we would see who made great chocolate chip cookies,” she says. “After 9-11, everyone figured out what they could do to help the families. Everyone seemed to help in their own way, with their own talents, connections or interests. Bakers baked, and teachers offered to tutor. If someone had a plow, they cleared snow from driveways. If someone ran a camp, they offered a free camp session. We all came together and I wanted to create a foundation that reflected this mentality that we all had in those weeks and months after the attacks.”
These meaningful gatherings grew into Heartworks, which was formally founded as a nonprofit in 2005. Its mission is to maintain the sense of connection and overt kindness our country had experienced through the terrorist attacks. “Our tagline is ‘Looking inward, giving outward.’ From the beginning, there were two aspects: Giving and practicing receiving in our own lives and for our own self-growth,” she says. “When you volunteer from a place of your own vulnerability, it has the power to heal your own life. So, when you deliver a lasagna to someone, bring it to them recalling how your friends took you out to dinner when your father was sick and how that made you feel like part of a loving circle. That way of thinking helps us to be more compassionate human beings.”
Since its founding, Heartworks has helped over 1,200 families and uses social media as a way to remind people about the power of receiving, giving and self-reflection.
Heartworks helps people in the first 12 to 14 months of acute grief, illness and injury and seeks to do something that will directly ease some of their burdens. For example, they may fund a cleaning service, arrange for dinners, or a child’s birthday party for a family whose pain doesn’t allow them the luxury of planning necessary life events.
The organization pays special attention to veterans. Each month, about 25 veterans from VFW Post 7858 in Bernardsville hold their monthly meeting at Heartworks, where volunteers serve catered food from local restaurants and Junior Heartworks—comprised of teenage girls from local high schools—make centerpieces and placemats and roll the silverware in napkins. “When our veterans come into the Heartworks space, they are walking into a room full of love,” McDowell says.
Heartworks seeks to empower people to be intuitive to the needs of others and practice random acts of kindness. McDowell encourages people to follow them on social media and log on to the website for Heartworks’ “100 Ways to Help” for inspiration on how to pay it forward or to view upcoming events, like delivering Thanksgiving meals to exhausted families.
“Part of our messaging is that everyone can do what we are doing,” McDowell says. “Hone into what you love to do in your life: If you love to cook, babysit or grocery shop, if you’re good at fundraising or organizing medical bills offer that gift to another human being when they are on their knees.”
Find out more ways to practice kindness at njheartworks.org.