Karuna Tarafdar visited Cambridge Health Alliance to get treatment for a broken ankle in summer of 2025. In August of this year, she came back to donate 88 handmade crochet roses to be given to patients at the CHA’s Breast Center.
The roses were crafted by students through the summer program and high school club Tarafdar started. She is the founder and president of Crochet for Our Community, which originally began as a summer program for tweens and teens at the Newton Free Library in 2024. The program just completed its third summer there and has expanded to Newton South High School, becoming a student-run club with weekly meetings — what started as a craft became a point of community connection.
At CHA, the doctor who treated her was the original point of contact when it came time to connect with potential patients. Tarafdar, who is a senior at Newton South, was connected with Melisa Difusco, practice manager, orthopedics at CHA. Difusco said she immediately thought it would be great for patients and was struck by Tarafdar being so thoughtful at such a young age. Though donations happen frequently, Difusco said, there are not as many to CHA — a smaller, public healthcare system —than to some of the larger hospitals in the Boston area.
The 88 roses were all handmade by students through the summer program and club at Newton South — brought by Tarafdar in vases to the Cambridge Breast Center at CHA, where they were then distributed to patients. Tarafdar said that keeping donations local was initially a decision to start simple, and that “we’re all kind of connected in the Boston area.”
It’s the fourth donation of their creations the club has made to various community organizations in the last three years. It also sold another batch at a local art sale.
“From what I’ve heard you can’t replicate crocheting,” Tarafdar said. “So these roses, you wouldn’t be able to make them with a machine. It would have to be made by a person.”
Before CHA, Crochet for Our Community donated more than a dozen crochet bunnies to Brookview House in Boston and another 13 to the Plain Jaine Foundation in Wellesley, as well as more than 30 crochet beanies to Heading Home in Boston.
For Tarafdar, the donation element was a keystone of the club’s creation. She had learned to crochet when she was in middle school, and wanted to give other middle schoolers who were learning to crochet a clear goal and unify them in working toward it. Initially, she admitted, there was a learning curve in teaching younger kids the craft, but it became one of the more inspiring parts of the program. She recalled stories of her student leadership team — some of who are in the grades below her, giving her confidence in “the next generation of crocheters” — interacting carefully with the middle schoolers at the Newton Free Library summer program, helping them every step of the way as they learned a new skill.
Megan Coffey, assistant supervisor of youth services for teens and tweens at the Newton Free Library, has been helping Tarafdar organize the summer program for three years and described it as “spectacular.”
“I think that at its core, a library is meant to help students and help anybody of any age learn something new,” Coffey said. “And it might not be like you’re going to become an expert on the first day, but if it just sparks some little kernel of ‘oh I like this’, then that’s really cool.”
Amelia Fricano, a senior at Newton South and vice president of Crochet for Our Community, joined her sophomore year and has attended most of the weekly meetings since she joined. The meetings, beyond evoking the feeling of giving back to the community, are “just a really nice place to come to every week,” she said.
Tarafdar said she appreciates the organization not just for the creations but for the connection it inspires among club and community members. She estimated that around 20 people come to each meeting during the school year.
“Even if I had a horrible math test … I could come back to crochet for our community,” Tarafdar said. “And we’re all crocheting together and laughing … it’s such a relaxing time, and I really appreciate having that.”
This story is part of a partnership between Cambridge Day and the Boston University Department of Journalism’s Newsroom program.
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