Hope in the Heartland

In her neighborhood recreational center, Esther Buttitta, 74, a retired schoolteacher, is drawing on years of carefully honed teaching skills to engage a handful of local kids whose parents are out running errands. “Finger painting with chocolate pudding is pretty easy if you just dive right in, see?” she says chirpily, before unloading a Jell-O container onto the white paper in front of her and digging in. As her creation takes shape, Andrew Boatright, 3, is quiet, wide-eyed, awed. Soon his primitive portraits cover the table, and many dollops of brown glop adorn his newly animated face.

Buttitta is careful not to press too hard, as Andrew is just beginning to come out of his shell. Prior to being taken in by his adoptive family two years ago, he and his older brother Anthony had been shuffled through five foster homes. Before she moved into the neighborhood, Buttitta had had hip, heart and back surgery–all within a 12-month period–and suspected her days of enriching young minds were over. Now the two provide sustenance for each other in Hope Meadows, a community that seems to have been carved out of an earlier time, one in which the work of raising children was shared across the generations.

What’s different about Hope Meadows is that it is not just multigenerational but multiracial as well. Previously part of the Chanute Air Force Base in Rantoul, Ill., 125 miles south of Chicago, this three-block array of ranch houses has been transformed into the home of a pioneering program that targets difficult-to-place foster children who are–or are likely to be–available for adoption. A quarter of the 568,000 children in state care in America, these kids tend to be older or in sibling groups; they are likely to have been severely abused or neglected, exposed to drugs and a slew of foster homes; they often have physical, emotional and behavioral problems. Sometimes they can’t form attachments.

The power of multigenerational housing has become a draw for Americans as they rediscover the virtues of the extended family. Developers like Del Webb are creating communities across the country designed for Mom, Dad, the kids–and Grandma and Grandpa. Hope has taken this natural, practical template a step farther. Qualified adults who commit to adopting up to four kids are offered free rent, a $19,000 salary for one parent to stay home and a vast network of support. Low-to-middle-income seniors receive reduced rent in exchange for volunteering a minimum of six hours a week. The result–a near miracle in a society dominated by divorce and generational disjunction–is a place where everyone knows everyone else, a stimulating haven for seniors and permanence for some of our nation’s most vulnerable kids. “Hope is really quite different,” says Carol Spigner, a former Clinton Administration children’s welfare official. “It is probably the first child-welfare effort that has institutionalized intergenerational relationships, which are key, as part of a community.”

Since Hope’s launch in 1994, 45 difficult-to-place kids have been adopted; six are expected to be; 19 have returned to a family member; and just seven have returned to state care. Hope’s adoption rate from 1994 to ’99 was more than three times the average rate of adoption and guardianship for foster kids in the state as a whole. Its initial success has inspired an Excellence in Adoption award from President Clinton, backing from TV-talk-show host Rosie O’Donnell, a book (Hope Meadows, by journalist Wes Smith) and grass-roots support from community leaders across the country eager to set up their own models.

Part of Generations of Hope, a nonprofit organization, Hope Meadows is the brainchild of University of Illinois sociologist Brenda Krause Eheart, who got the idea after five years of research into the adoptions of older children, which she discovered often failed. The key problem, she found, was that even the best foster families felt isolated. Without constant, accessible support, they found the task overwhelming. Eheart also fondly recalled having older neighbors who were devoted to her family when her children were young. In the early ’90s, when some politicians were promoting a return to orphanages and group homes, Eheart says, “It sent me over the edge. It became urgent to come up with a better way to do this.”

To do that required convincing the Department of Defense to sell 84 housing “units” (later transformed into 42 apartments and 12 spacious family homes) on the Chanute base, which had just closed–no small task. But after two years of inconclusive weekly calls to the Pentagon, Eheart sent a fax to President Clinton. Nine days later, a cadre of federal officials visited Rantoul to negotiate a price for the property–$215,000 for 22 acres.

For Hope’s 12 families–whose foster kids are referred by the state Department of Children and Family Services–support is key. There are weekly educational sessions for parents, a therapist on call 24 hours a day and a staff of intimately involved caseworkers and administrators. There are Hope barbecues and adoption parties. On average seniors double their required volunteer hours as crossing guards, tutors, day-care aides, baby sitters and grandparents. “And the families help each other,” says resident Debbie Calhoun, a married mother of nine (only one of whom is biological). “We’re all doing the same thing.”

Most striking, though, are the relationships that emerge. Hope single mom Jeanette Laws and her family took to senior Irene Bohn, 77, a former nun and schoolteacher, after Bohn began to tutor Laws’ son Brandon, now 12. When Brandon first arrived at Hope at age six, he “couldn’t hold a pencil, didn’t know colors,” recalls Laws, who suspects he had been involved in a cult. But Bohn persisted, encouraging him. In the fall Brandon–until now in special ed–will start school in a regular class for the first time. On those rare nights Bohn doesn’t come over for dinner, Brandon calls on her to see if she’s O.K. Bohn has requested that Brandon be one of her pallbearers. “I would do anything for that boy,” she admits.

Grandparents make great problem solvers. When Elsa Raab’s eldest child Katara, 13, gets enraged, yelling at her mom and bemoaning the loss of her birth family, someone always calls Loralee Pena, 60, herself a former foster child. “She understands my problems,” says Katara. Her brother Steven, 11, who arrived so disturbed he could not refer to himself in the first person, now regularly flies into the Penas’ home looking for Loralee’s husband, a.k.a. Grandpa Al, with whom he weed-whacks the grass.

The seniors get a lot out of Hope too. Jo Young, 66, and her husband recently took one of the Laws children on a trip to Disneyland. “They keep you on your toes,” says Young. The bustle is apparently catching. Elmer Davis and his wife Marjorie moved, sight unseen, from Florida in the dead of winter after their son found Hope. Davis, who used to stay in bed most of the day after multiple surgeries, now spends his time chasing kids. Next month, he will chaperone Hope’s biannual trip, this time to Seattle.

It’s too early to tell if the Hope model can be effective–and financially viable–over the long term. The state contributes $500,000 a year, and there’s the $300 a month from 42 senior units. The total cost is $16,000 a child–more than traditional foster care but about half the cost of institutional homes. Eheart says she is seeking a $10 million endowment–a daunting figure, until one considers that 80% of Illinois’ prison population are former foster kids.

Eheart is not waiting for someone to pass judgment. She is working on a plan to care for Hope’s seniors, recognizing that they are likely to die there long after they’re able to do volunteer work. She is also in the early stages of a plan to replicate Hope Meadows. A 1997 partnership with Ronald McDonald House Charities to develop models was abandoned as premature. Though most of the former military bases have been bought by developers, a potential land donation in Michigan has Eheart leaning toward starting a new project from scratch, meaning new homes and sewers, staff and services–and another $10 million, which Rosie O’Donnell has agreed to help raise. “My dream is to have a few in every state,” says Eheart. No small task either. But don’t rule a big idea out.