CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - For a small Illinois community dedicated to saving foster children, the Christmas season has been unusually merry and bright.
First a U.S. senator came visiting. Then there was news of a federal grant for the five-block subdivision tucked into an abandoned Air Force base in Rantoul, Ill.
But the best gift of all, according to Hope Meadow's director, was the adoption of a "hard-to-adopt" child - a teenager - and the promise of another adoption soon to follow.
Single-mom Lisa Davis wrote the following "birth announcement" for her most-recently adopted child: "It's a Boy!! November 8, 2004, 10:30 a.m., Daniel Lee Davis, age 14, weight 154 lbs., length 69 1/2 inches.
"In my mind I realize that I may have missed his first words, first steps, first day of school, but my heart doesn't know that. This is my son.
"It has been a long wait - five years, six months, one week and one day, roughly translated, that is 2,911,290 minutes, but who is counting?!! It has been worth every minute. Proud Mamma, Lisa Davis."
In the next few days, Lisa Davis will be composing another birth announcement: for Aden, 10, who will be adopted into her family. In addition to Daniel and Aden, the Davises include adopted sons Brandon, 7, and his biological brother, Ryan, 8, and Cali, 20, Davis' biological daughter.
"At Hope, adoption is always the best gift," said Brenda Krause Eheart, Hope's director.
It has been a very good season, indeed, a great year and an amazing decade for Hope, corporately known as Generations of Hope, www.generationsofhope.org.
Mid-month, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., visited Hope, bringing the news that it would receive a $400,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice.
A member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Durbin secured the funding through the fiscal year 2005 omnibus appropriations bill, which Congress recently approved and President Bush signed into law.
The money, Durbin said, will help cover operating funds needed to expand Hope's program, which is focused on adoption as an alternative to long-term foster care.
The program's "record of achievement speaks for itself: a 90 percent permanency rate for children, and a cost that is half that of typical residential programs," Durbin said.
Located on the perimeter of the former Chanute Air Force Base, 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 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign when she began Hope, a one-of-a-kind residential community created to offer some of Illinois' most needy foster children a secure and nurturing environment.
At Hope, neglected and abused kids who, for their safety have been removed from their biological parents, and who in many cases have bounced around in the foster-care system, find - often for the first time in their lives - permanent and loving homes.
In time, 90 percent of the children - many arriving with siblings, learning disabilities and the open wounds of physical and emotional mistreatment - are adopted into Hope families.
Kids of all kinds - biological, foster and adopted, Caucasian and African American, live together in single- and two-parent families, surrounded by surrogate grandparents. Hope is where healing begins.
But it isn't a utopia, said Eheart, now with the U. of I. 's Institute of Government and Public Affairs. The community has embraced kids who have endured years of deprivation. For example, before coming to Hope, one child ate her crayons when there wasn't any food in her foster home. Another arrived never having held a crayon. For some children, the most vivid memory is violence, for others, 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, for example, now is a student at Yale University, and many kids are making remarkable progress in their schools and lives.
The social experiment, like the children it is raising, is growing up. This fall Hope celebrated its 10th birthday. The years have brought a few failures, many more victories and at least one totally unexpected outcome: transformative bonds between the kids and the seniors, Eheart said. Children who had never experienced positive adult attention, unconditional love or spontaneous acts of generosity, find these in abundance in their "grandparents," and grandparents, in turn, find a daily dose of purpose.
"In these supportive relationships, one generation's needs become another's salvation," Eheart said.
Esther Buttitta, an especially active 77-year-old resident at Hope, likes to put it another way: "There's a lot of chicken soup around here."
She's speaking literally and figuratively. A great deal of good old-fashioned generosity of spirit reverberates through this neighborhood of large houses and lawns - and not simply at Christmastime. For example, kids comforting convalescing "grandparents," grandparents doing emergency repairs on dolls and bikes, parents sending casseroles to folks 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. Forty-five "seniors," 20 of them married couples, share their skills and 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 their 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 to be with their children. Some, like Lisa Davis, home-school their kids, turning their dining rooms or basements into classrooms.
Hope receives 12 percent of its annual income revenues from the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services; 55 percent comes from grants, 20 percent from housing rental income, 8 percent from private support, and 5 percent from other sources. It operates on a shoestring budget and a small staff, and accepts monetary donations.
Eheart battled the Pentagon to purchase the parcel of federal land when Chanute Air Force Base was being closed in 1993. Eventually, she went to President Clinton in her struggle to secure the 80-house subdivision. The idea to convert part of a 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 never imagined what Hope Meadows would evolve into.
"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 children who had learning disabilities, less than desirable behaviors and trouble trusting others. "These kids are respectful, they take responsibility and they care," Eheart said.
"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."
This is a very different model from the one typically used to address social problems in this country, Eheart said, "where 'professionals' provide services that often are based on needs, deficiencies, inadequacies."
"Here, services are being delivered from within. Through mutual intergenerational support, Hope residents largely determine the shape of their relationships, commitments, obligations and services. The community offers both hope and care, families are honored and intergenerational friendships are cherished."
There is a trickle-down effect, Eheart said: As the kids get older, "they can't help but care about each other, their parents and the seniors, because that's what they've been seeing here." This dynamic may partly explain why two of the teens are talking about going into geriatric nursing.
Another dynamic that has emerged, giving Eheart great satisfaction, is seeing the serious health problems of the seniors "almost become 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 it means 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 is a good example of this phenomenon. Despite congestive heart disease, diabetes and other serious health problems, Buttitta won't quit. Even her oxygen treatments several times a day don't get in the way of her contributions to the community.
"We all need to be needed," she explained.
Buttitta arrived at Hope in 1997, fairly well-qualified for her new role as a mentor-tutor, having been an elementary school teacher in nearby Thomasboro for 24 years, and having 23 grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.
Her Hope grandchildren call her "the doll grandma" because she makes doll clothes for them, even mends dolls when need be. She keeps a bevy of Barbies and other dolls, official greeters of sorts, on her living room sofa, and a lending library of doll and teddy bear clothes. She is prepared for any contingency, amenable and unflappable.
Children often call and visit "Miss Esther" - and not just for the dolls. "Marty" brings her newspaper every day, putting it directly in her hands because she can't stoop, and often drops by to talk. Miss Esther has been mentoring Crystal for two years.
Buttitta concedes that she's had "disappointments, flair-ups, breakdowns."
"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, has been a man of "1,000 different jobs," he said. Twice retired, from the U.S. Army as director of military combat development, and from Electronic Data Systems as a senior account manager, Donovan, like Buttitta, could have retired the easy way and lived anywhere, but his wife wanted to move to Hope.
Soon after they arrived, however, Kathy Donovan resumed her job as an information technology consultant, putting her on the road a good deal. Her husband recalls feeling displaced, "dumped in the middle of nowhere. It was the worst situation I'd ever been in," Donovan said, adding that he'd always been a career person, "never had time for neighbors, for anything, really."
But, he picked himself up and got mowing - "That's the best way to meet people," he said. Soon 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.
"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 experiment in living hasn't been perfect, however. Since coming to Hope, he has had seven strokes, one that nearly leveled him a year ago.
Before the strokes, he'd shuttle kids to school and to church and take them on road trips to museums in Chicago and Indianapolis.
These days, Donovan monitors Hope's computer lab, tutors, baby-sits and mows. Mostly recovered, he hasn't yet regained full use of his right hand.
"The important thing is knowing that if I get sick, I have 100 neighbors who will take care of me, and when my wife retires, she'll have them too."
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."
Purpose is proliferating. Eheart has received calls from people all across the country wanting to replicate Hope. Currently, she's working with a group in Portland, Ore., to model the program as closely as possible.
"I'm absolutely convinced that intergenerational communities can help address social problems, whether they are related to older adults or to children," Eheart said.
Put another way, as she did in her recent Hope Herald holiday column, Eheart wrote: "As we celebrate the holidays, we - the children, their wonderful parents and all our grandmas and grandpas - rejoice in growing older together.
"Our collective New Year's wish is that everyone everywhere experiences a circle of care - of being surrounded with intergenerational love where the gift of giving and receiving is not reserved for special occasions."