Today we’d like to introduce you to Ashley Manning.
Hi Ashley, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
Watch Love Grow began in 2021 with a simple idea: to make sure widows in our community felt remembered on Valentine’s Day.
What started as a small effort to deliver flowers and a little love to women who might otherwise be facing a difficult day quickly became something much bigger than I ever imagined. Friends volunteered, businesses stepped in to help, people began sharing the stories of widows they loved, and year after year, the community surrounding the project continued to grow.
For the first several years, we were known as the Valentine’s Day Widow Outreach Project. But as the organization grew, I began to realize that the heart behind what we were doing was never really about one holiday—or even one particular kind of loss. It was about showing up for people in the moments when grief can make them feel forgotten.
In 2025, we expanded our work to include A Mother’s Love, an initiative supporting mothers who have experienced the loss of a child around Mother’s Day. That expansion ultimately led us to become Watch Love Grow—a name that I believe captures what has been happening since the very beginning: when people are willing to notice someone who is hurting, step into their story, and love them well, that love has a way of growing far beyond the original act.
Today, Watch Love Grow reaches thousands of people across communities throughout the country and brings together an extraordinary network of volunteers, donors, businesses and families. What began with flowers has grown into something I never could have planned.
And yet, in many ways, the mission is still incredibly simple: we want people walking through grief and difficult seasons to know that they are seen, they are remembered, and they are loved.
I never set out to build a nonprofit of this size. I simply kept saying yes to the next person, the next need and the next opportunity to love someone well. Looking back, I can see how God has taken each of those small yeses and turned them into something far greater than I could have imagined.
That is really the story of Watch Love Grow: one act of love becoming another, and another—and getting to watch what happens when a community chooses to love people together.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It definitely hasn’t always been a smooth road. Interestingly, the biggest challenges haven’t been finding people who want to help—they’ve been the logistics and technology required to manage the tremendous amount of love people want to give.
As Watch Love Grow has grown, so has the complexity behind the scenes. We are coordinating thousands of nominations, volunteers, deliveries and gifts across multiple communities, and for years we pieced together different systems and a lot of very manual processes to make it all work.
One of our biggest turning points came in 2026, when we realized we had reached a size where we needed technology built specifically for what we do. We began developing a platform that could manage the entire process—from accepting and organizing nominations by geographic location, to assigning and routing volunteer drivers, to tracking deliveries and making sure every person we promise to remember is actually reached.
There have certainly been growing pains along the way, but I think they are also a reflection of something really beautiful: the mission grew faster than the infrastructure behind it.
Our challenge now is figuring out how to build systems that allow us to grow without losing what makes Watch Love Grow special in the first place. At the end of the day, every name in our system represents a real person with a real story. Technology can help us reach thousands of people, but we never want the experience to feel like someone is simply a number on a list.
We want to grow—and grow well—while protecting the deeply personal heart of what we do.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I always laugh a little when someone asks what I specialize in, because I certainly didn’t set out to become an expert in running a nonprofit. I’m a wife, a mother of four, and I started my career as a florist. I owned a flower shop called Pretty Things by A.E. Manning, and I think, in many ways, those parts of my life have shaped Watch Love Grow more than any formal training ever could.
Being a florist taught me that flowers are rarely just flowers. We send them when someone is celebrating, grieving, healing, or simply needs to know they are loved. And being a wife and mother has taught me how much the small things matter—remembering someone, showing up, noticing when someone might need a little extra love.
That is really what Watch Love Grow specializes in: remembering people during seasons when the rest of the world may have moved on.
We are probably best known for our Valentine’s Day outreach to widows and widowers and A Mother’s Love, which supports mothers who have lost a child around Mother’s Day. More recently, we have also begun finding other ways to step into individual stories when we feel there is an opportunity to make a meaningful difference.
What I am most proud of, though, isn’t necessarily how many people we reach. It is the community that has formed around the mission. Thousands of people are willing to give their time, money, talents and hearts simply to make someone they may never meet feel loved.
I think what sets Watch Love Grow apart is how personal we work very hard to keep it, even as we grow. We aren’t trying to fix grief, because we can’t. We aren’t trying to take away someone’s pain. We are simply willing to enter into it for a moment and say, “We see you. We remember. You matter.”
I think there is tremendous power in that.
And maybe what I’m proudest of personally is that all of this started without some grand plan. It started with flowers, a willingness to show up, and a belief that a small act of love could grow into something bigger.
It turns out it can.
If you had to, what characteristic of yours would you give the most credit to?
I think the quality that has been most important to my success is simply that I genuinely love people. I have always been deeply compassionate, and when I see someone hurting, it is very difficult for me to just walk past it.
Service has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. Growing up, I was involved with Habitat for Humanity, and later I had the opportunity to do mission work in Haiti. For a long time, I think I believed that serving in a meaningful way meant going somewhere far away—to another community or even another country—to find people who needed help.
As it turns out, my ministry started right in my own backyard.
Watch Love Grow began by noticing people in my own community who were hurting and asking a very simple question: What can I do to make this day a little less difficult for them?
I think compassion is what allows me to see the person before I see the project. Even as Watch Love Grow has grown, I never want to lose that. Behind every nomination, every flower arrangement, every delivery and every story is a real human being who has loved deeply and lost deeply.
I love people. I love hearing their stories. I love finding ways to make them feel seen and cared for. And I think that genuine love for people has been the thread running through everything we have built.
One of the greatest lessons of my life has been realizing that you don’t have to travel across the world to find your mission field. Sometimes it is right outside your front door.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.watchlovegrow.org and www.watchlovegrow.org
- Instagram: @Watchlovegrowcharlotte
