As a professional cuddler, Lee Frank has felt the love for 25 years. Her role at The Cradle adoption agency in Evanston, Illinois is to hold the babies who are waiting to be adopted.

“It’s part of me, the need to nurture,” she says. This also explains why she is notably one of the best gardeners in the northern suburbs of Chicago.

Before moving to a condominium, Lee had a garden where every year she grew more than 1,000 plants from seed. Her garden was awarded a Grand Prize from the Men’s Garden Club of the North Shore, beating out full-time gardeners.

She was honored as a Super Senior by the NSSC this year, and she was nominated by the North Shore Garden Club, a group dedicated to beautification, education and conservation. She’s been a member since 1983 and has served as the club’s president since 2006. The club puts on one of the area’s premier garden walks to raise money for scholarship and conservation organizations, including the Chicago Botanic Garden.

She is also board secretary and a founding member of Book Worm Angels, a literacy organization that has collected almost 2 million books for 8,000 children in 200 schools in underprivileged areas of Chicago over the past 10 years.

And what motivates all this giving back? “It’s almost like a compulsion for me to share,” she says. “To give, that’s what’s meaningful in life. I try to make the world better with the gifts I have.”

Revised from an article on www.makeitbetter.com.