Ashley Manning’s idea for her Valentine’s Day Widow Outreach Project started in 2020 with a gesture for a preschool teacher. Manning, a mother of four, thought it would be nice to give a bouquet of flowers to her child's teacher whose husband had died of cancer. She didn't realize its full impact until after COVID closed schools that spring and the teacher drove by their house to say goodbye to her 4-year-old son.
“She said, ‘You’ll never know what that meant that you acknowledged my pain on that day,’” Manning recalls. “It was more than ‘Oh, here are some chocolates.’ It was, ‘I know you’re probably not going to get flowers, so I want you to have these.’”
A year later, she started a floral business, Pretty Things by AE Manning. Preparing for Valentine’s Day, she thought of that teacher. She decided to enlist her Instagram followers to give a portion of their orders to donate flowers to widows.
“Losing your spouse is a fear that many of us can only imagine,” she posted. “I would like to show the women who have lost their spouse there are still people that love and care for them.”
Volunteers lined up to help arrange vases. Trader Joe’s and Harris Teeter donated chocolate. Starbucks donated coffee for the volunteers. They delivered flowers to 125 widows the first year, 400 the second.
“Before we knew it, it just took off,” Manning says.
In 2022, her Valentine's Day Widow Outreach Project was featured in People Magazine, then the Today Show, along with nearly 40 media outlets. They delivered 800 bouquets in 2023. Last year it was 1,100, and Manning mentored people starting similar projects in Houston, Nashville, Buffalo, Hutchinson (Minn.), and Pittsburgh, where she grew up.
This year it look just 24 hours to fill 650 volunteer spots to arrange flowers. Another 600 volunteers will deliver them as far as Columbia, S.C., Asheville and Raleigh.
Twenty percent of the volunteers are widows. Manning said she can always tell if a new volunteer is a widow, when she asks how they found the program. “As soon as somebody takes a deep breath (and says) ‘Oh, I got flowers [from Widow Outreach] last year,’” Manning says.
Jillian Myers, wife of Charlotte weatherman Jason Myers who died in a helicopter crash two years ago, is now a liaison to help widows in the group support each other.
Even as Widow Outreach grows, Manning always goes back to the feeling she got that first year in 2021, delivering flowers and a bottle of wine to a neighbor two doors down from her house.
It was cold and rainy, so she sent her children to the doorstep of a 92-year-old woman that neighbors said was a widow. Nobody answered, so Manning walked up to retrieve the wine, worried it might freeze if left. That's when the door opened.
“People say all kinds of things when they answer the door like, ‘I didn't order this,’ ‘It’s the wrong house,’” Manning says. “When we explained it to her, she said, ‘Wow, I can't really believe this. I think I'm going to cry.’”
Walking back to the car, her 6-year-old daughter, Mia, asked if that moment was why she started Widow Outreach.
“My kids understand what it feels like to give back,” Manning says.
She runs the nonprofit out of a south Charlotte house she bought in 2013. She has since discovered the house was previously owned by Mary Lance Sisk, daughter of the former CEO of Lance Packing Co., who once worked alongside evangelist Billy Graham. A stained-glass window in one room of the house's addition is inscribed with a bible verse: “He pastures his flocks among the lilies of the valley, Song of Solomon.”
“I used to wonder why, of all the scripture, she chose that,” Manning says. “It took a couple of years of outreach to let it all sink in; here we are pastoring his flocks among the flowers. We are nurturing, caring and loving our neighbors with flowers.”