PUBLICATIONS Inside Illinois Vol. 24, No. 13, Jan. 20, 2005

Rantoul community fosters hope for young and old alike

By Andrea Lynn, Staff Writer
217-333-2177; andreal@illinois.edu

Click photo to enlarge Photo by Kwame Ross Hope for the future Brenda Krause Eheart (back), Hope Meadow’s director and an adjunct faculty member in the UI’s Institute of Government and Public Affairs, poses with Rachael, front, and Tina, children at the foster community she founded in 1994. The community was created to offer some of Illinois’ neediest foster children a secure and nurturing environment. David Hopping, sociology, also is affiliated with Hope as a research associate.

The holiday season was unusually merry and bright for one small neighborhood in Rantoul. And the New Year has started spectacularly.

But then, hope and joy are nearly always in the air at Hope Meadows.

In mid-December, Sen. Dick Durbin visited the five-block subdivision tucked into the abandoned Chanute Air Force Base, bringing news that he’d secured a $400,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice for Hope.

Then came the holiday party, made especially festive when three children were presented with their own quilts – hand-made by their Hope “grandmothers.”

But the best gift of all, according to Hope Meadow’s director, was an adoption.

Proud mom Lisa Davis wrote a “birth announcement” for 10-year-old Ayden’s Jan. 10 adoption. It was the second time in less than two months that Davis had written an announcement.

Click photos to enlarge Photos by Kwame Ross Volunteer mentors Steve Donovan, 64, and Esther Buttitta, 77, are two of the 45 seniors who live in the Hope Meadows community and volunteer as mentors-tutors and extended family members to the community’s 42 children. Donovan, who joined Hope in 2002, said the community has given him a renewed sense of purpose and kinship. Buttitta, a retired teacher, has been at Hope since 1997. “We all need to be needed,” she explained.

In November, the single mom adopted a so-called “hard-to-adopt” child, a teenager. Daniel, 14, had been in her family for five years before she could adopt him.

The Davises also include adopted sons Brandon, 7, and his biological brother, Ryan, 8, and Davis’ biological daughter, Cali, 20.

At Hope, adoption is always the goal, always the best gift, said Brenda Krause Eheart, Hope’s director.

No ordinary suburban neighborhood, Hope is focused on adoption as an alternative to long-term foster care. It was created to offer some of Illinois’ neediest foster children – kids who have been neglected and abused, who have bounced around in the system and even grown “too old” for adoption – a secure and nurturing environment.

But in its own way, Hope is both an anachronism and a futuristic enclave. ABC newsman Ted Koppel once called it “a town so old-fashioned it’s new.”

Eheart was a developmental psychologist at the UI when she began the unique residential community.

Her idea caught on, worked. Ninety percent of the children – many having arrived with siblings, learning disabilities and the open wounds of physical and emotional mistreatment – are adopted into Hope families.

Living in single- and two-parent families, kids with different histories blend together – biological with foster and adopted, Caucasian with African American. And everyone is security-blanketed by loving surrogate grandparents. Hope – corporately known as Generations of Hope – is where healing begins.

But it isn’t a utopia, concedes Eheart, now with the UI Institute of Government and Public Affairs. It is hard work. The community has embraced kids who have endured years of deprivation, violence and even sexual abuse.

“I’m stunned, to this day I’m stunned, about what’s happening to kids out there,” Eheart said, “but I’m also stunned to see what these kids, when given a chance, are capable of achieving.” One of Hope’s adopted children is at Yale University, and many other kids are making remarkable progress in their schools and lives.

Like the children it is raising, Hope is growing up. This fall it celebrated its 10th birthday. The years have brought a few failures, many victories and at least one totally unexpected outcome: transformative bonds between the kids and the seniors. Children who had rarely, if ever, experienced positive adult attention, unconditional love or spontaneous acts of generosity, find these in abundance in their “grandparents,” and their grandparents, in turn, find a daily dose of feeling needed.

“In these supportive relationships, one generation’s needs become another’s salvation,” Eheart said.

One can see it all over this neighborhood: Kids comfort convalescing “grandparents”; grandparents make emergency repairs on toys; parents send casseroles to those who can’t get out.

Today, Hope has 11 families who are raising 42 children – 10 of them biological, 32 adopted/foster, including nine sets of siblings. The 45 grandparents, “seniors” as they are called, include 20 married couples. Seniors share their skills and life experiences, volunteering communally on average 1,400 hours a month, 13,500 a year – 10,000 of the hours spent directly with children.

Families live rent-free in six-bedroom, two-bathroom homes; seniors pay $325 to $350 a month – about $100 below market value – for their three-bedroom condos. Stay-at-home parents receive a base salary of $19,000 a year. Some, like Lisa Davis, home-school their kids.

Eheart battled the Pentagon to purchase the parcel of federal land when Chanute was being closed in 1993. Eventually, she went to President Clinton to secure the 80-house subdivision. The idea to convert part of the base into a village that would raise hard-to-adopt children came to her when she was doing research on Illinois’ adoption and foster-care system.

But 10 years ago, she couldn’t have imagined how Hope Meadows would evolve.

“Back then, we wanted only to get children out of the foster-care system and into adoptive homes here,” she said.

The community has succeeded splendidly at that, and also in helping turn around kids who had learning disabilities, less than desirable behaviors and trouble trusting others.

“Yet, I truly believe that our legacy is not going to be that we made a huge difference in the way people do foster care. That’s going to be a piece of it, certainly. But our real legacy is going to be a new model for living, where people can come together regardless of age, race and income, to really care about each other and meet each others’ needs.”

Eheart said that through their everyday acts of care, the people of Hope are “challenging the social assumptions, cultural practices and structural constraints that stand in the way of improving the lives of some of our most vulnerable citizens – the young and the old.”

Another dynamic has emerged, surprising Eheart and giving her great satisfaction: The serious health problems of the seniors “are becoming almost secondary to what they are able to do.”

“I don’t think they dwell on their health problems. I don’t think the community dwells on them, either. Which means that the seniors’ day-to-day lives are richer. I also believe that because they feel needed, many of them are going to live longer.

“Our seniors are absolutely defying the degenerative model of aging.”

Esther Buttitta, 77, is a good example. Despite congestive heart disease, diabetes and other serious health problems, she just keeps going and giving.

“We all need to be needed,” she explained.

Buttitta arrived at Hope in 1997, fairly well-qualified to be a mentor-tutor, having been an elementary school teacher for 24 years, and having 23 grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.

Buttitta is a kid-magnet. Her Hope grandchildren call her “the doll grandma” because she tends to their dolls’ needs for clothing and repair. They also find “Miss Esther” comforting, and they often stop by – to visit or see if she needs anything.

Buttitta concedes that she’s had disappointments.

“This isn’t heaven,” she said. “It’s Hope. It’s the reason I get up in the morning.”

Steve Donovan, a Hope senior since 2002, concurs. Now twice retired, the former director of military combat development for the U.S. Army and senior account manager for a data systems company could have, like Buttitta, lived his “golden years” in an easy chair. He also could have lived anywhere, but his wife wanted to move to Hope.

Soon after they arrived, however, she resumed her job. Donovan concedes having felt miserable at first – “dumped in the middle of nowhere. It was the worst situation I’d ever been in.”

Donovan explained that he’d always been “a career person, never had time for neighbors, for anything, really.”

But, he rallied and came up with a plan: to mow all of Hope Meadows. “Mowing is a great way to meet people,” he said. Eventually, the father of eight grown children, grandfather of a dozen, had mowed every lawn in the 22-acre neighborhood, and in the process, met all of its residents. He also started shuttling kids to school and to lessons and taking them to museums in Chicago and Indianapolis.

In the process, “I fell in love with every person I met, and with Hope,” said the 64-year-old. “I’ve made good friends here. This is the greatest thing that has ever happened to me.”

Donovan’s new life hasn’t been perfect, however. Since coming to Hope, he has had seven strokes, one that nearly leveled him a year ago.

But like Buttitta, Donovan hasn’t thrown in the towel. Even though he hasn’t yet regained full use of his right hand, he now monitors Hope’s computer lab, tutors, baby-sits – and mows.

“The important thing is knowing that if I get sick, I have 100 neighbors who will take care of me.”

Asked why he stays at Hope, Donovan pointed to a man on the sidewalk. “See that man walking so purposefully?” he asked. “That’s what Hope has given me: purpose.”

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