Rantoul neighborhood offers support and hope for kids, parents and seniors
On a quiet street in Rantoul sits a small neighborhood of 15 nondescript duplex houses, part of a larger subdivision built decades ago to house the families of pilots and workers at the now-closed Chanute Air Force Base. Although it’s impossible to tell just by looking, something remarkable is happening here: adopted kids from troubled backgrounds are finding acceptance and support in the arms of neighbors old enough to be their grandparents. That’s by design at Hope Meadows, a community bringing together several generations of people from all walks of life for one purpose: building a safe and stable environment for adopted children.
Started in 1994 by Dr. Brenda Eheart, a researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Hope Meadows is a neighborhood of adopted children, their families and senior citizen volunteers, all working together to form a community of support and interdependence. What was started as a permanent destination for adopted children has also become a place where adoptive parents find support as they deal with often troubled kids, and where seniors can find continued purpose as they age. Hope is the first iteration of a social services model known as ICI – intergenerational community as intervention – and it is on the verge of spreading nationwide.
Families seeking to adopt move to Hope Meadows and are paired with children in need of a permanent home. Each family lives for free in one of the 15 six-bedroom homes converted from pairs of duplex apartments, and one parent is employed by Hope Meadows as a “family manager,” earning a stipend and health insurance coverage for the family. Meanwhile, senior residents at Hope volunteer for six hours each week and receive reduced rent on an apartment in the neighborhood. There is on-site counseling available for adopted children, and the whole neighborhood regularly participates in group activities that build intergenerational relationships. The secret of the program’s success is that the relationships are allowed to form naturally, which helps provide meaningful interaction and a sort of informal therapy for all involved.
Eheart says the idea for Hope Meadows came out of her research at UIUC. The State of Illinois had just gotten into the adoption and foster care business in the late 1980s, she says, and children were pouring into the system at a rate of about 1,000 per month due to the emergence of crack cocaine. Many of the foster care placements didn’t work well, and children would often get shuffled from family to family or end up in juvenile detention. Eheart began planning a community of adoptive families in 1992, but the final piece of the puzzle came about one year later, while Eheart was visiting a friend out East who turned her on to Maggie Coon, a community organizer in Philadelphia. Coon had created a system in which college students would live in the homes of senior citizens for reduced rent, and in return, would help maintain the homes.
“Flying home somewhere over Ohio or Indiana, I flipped it around in my head and
