Eliska Dumas and Chelsea Payne have been outstanding volunteers with the Rain Will Bring Flowers Foundation since the start of the Tabors’ impactful journey in 2023. After their 15-year-old son died by suicide, Lisa and Jordan Tabor began their mission to spread awareness and improve education on suicide prevention.

Dumas and Payne have been close friends of the Tabor family for years, and their kids were an inseparable trio. “They had a nickname as ‘The Tripod’ because it was always the three of them,” Payne says. The women have worked to spread the message and mission of RWBF since its inception. But Dumas, who works as a teacher, says that she really saw the foundation’s impact when it affected her own students.

“I overheard an eighth-grade student sharing with the class that she had started going to therapy. And that’s not something I had ever heard the kids talk about,” she recalls. “Her parents later told me that she felt brave enough to seek therapy and ask them about it because of the RWBF message and normalizing conversations about mental health.”

The annual Flowers Bloom Hope Gala raises money and awareness for the foundation’s suicide prevention efforts, including the Planting Seeds of Hope event, which aims to help students, particularly student-athletes, engage in open discussions about mental health-related topics.

“To see all of these kids that came to the event to listen to the panel, and to see that they were affected, was very impactful,” Dumas explains. “They were there and present, and they wanted to ask questions afterwards.”

 

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Dumas and Payne share that through the foundation, they have learned that everyone has a story, and call their experience volunteering extremely eye-opening.

“Mental health and suicide in general have been taboo subjects,” Payne says. “But when we’re out talking to people and taking donations, almost every person we speak to has been personally affected by suicide.”

Since its inception just over a year ago, RWBF Foundation has reached over 65,000 students, meaning more kids now have an outlet and a way to start the conversation about mental health. Volunteers like Payne and Dumas have helped RWBF break fundraising records and continue to grow its reach by training students on suicide prevention through Prevention in Every Parish—all while maintaining full-time jobs. “The Tabors are so inspiring that we have pushed ourselves to reach more kids, get our message out there and make every event better than the last,” Payne adds.

As they look to the future, Payne and Dumas hope to see more people volunteer with the organization. “We love reaching all ages of the community, but we would love to get some volunteers from the younger generation to really help spread our mission,” says Payne.

To learn more about Rain Will Bring Flowers in this story from the archives. To volunteer and get involved, visit the foundation’s website here.