Chapter One The squalid apartment in the Cabrini Green housing project was decidedly unfamiliar territory for a dairy farmer's daughter from western New York. It was 1968. Brenda Krause was fresh out of college with a degree in home economics, and newly hired as a caseworker for the city of Chicago's public welfare office. Her job was to teach child care, budget management, and homemaking skills to welfare recipients. But it was she who received an education--into urban poverty and the plight of America's neglected and abused children. I remember entering this apartment and going down this long, dark hallway with no windows, and cockroaches everywhere. In the very back, there was a crib just reeking of urine. There was a baby in the crib. I remember feeling despair, and thinking, "How can this child survive in this environment? How is his brain going to develop normally? How will he ever have any chance in life?" That night I called my mother, who'd spent her whole life on the family farm. She was terrified that I was working in the ghetto. I cried with her on the phone about that baby, because I felt there was no way to help that child. That was when I began having a deep interest in these kids. I take it personally when I see kids mistreated. I just think they need an advocate to fight for them, and when people in the child welfare system are not willing to do that, I don't understand it. For me, it's very simple: The kids' needs come first. That's the bottom line at Hope Meadows. We make decisions as if these are our own children, and when you think that way, your decisions are different than if you are just trying to work within a bureaucratic system. At fifty-five, this trim, brown-haired woman is a most unlikely crusader and pioneer in child welfare. Brenda was a farm girl from Basom, a village of only 100 residents in the far western corner of New York State. Even her name rings of rural domesticity, 4-H Club, and big family dinners at noon. "I was a home economist," Brenda Krause Eheart concedes. "I really fit the mold." In truth, she has broken the mold. The founder of Hope Meadows is an academic who has become an activist. She is a woman who trained to become a dispassionate social scientist, yet never lost her social conscience. Even now, she finds it difficult to talk about the backgrounds of the children within the community she created without shedding tears. Eheart's childhood was very much in line with the Norman Rockwell image for rural American family life. And today, her unique, multigenerational model for child welfare is rooted in those traditions. Within Hope Meadows, adults provide a secure, supportive environment for children whose needs are given a high priority. Brenda, her twin brother, and an older sister worked on the farm alongside their parents and a widowed grandfather who lived next door and joined them every night for supper. Brenda drove the tractor that pulled the hay rack while her father, grandfather, brother, and neighbors baled freshly cut hay. Her mother led the local 4-H Club that she and her sister, now a fiber artist, belonged to all through school. There was no generation gap. There was always a support network. Brenda had a steady high school boyfriend who she planned to marry and spend the rest of her life with in Basom. After earning her undergraduate degree nearby at the State University College of New York at Buffalo, she was on course to fulfill the goal of "mother and schoolteacher" recorded in her 1962 high school yearbook. She had an offer to teach in a local school, and her life appeared to be set and secure if that was what she wanted. But Brenda and the boyfriend broke up, and her mother, who had sometimes longed for a wider range of experience in her own life, encouraged Brenda to see some of the world. So, her path followed a much different course, beginning with her first job as a dietitian with the Stouffer's food company in Chicago. She worked there for about a year before deciding that she was ill-suited for corporate life. Contemplating a return to school for an advanced degree, Brenda took a six-month position that seemed safe and sensible, as a home economist for Cook County. One of her first assignments was helping a group of welfare recipients sew white prayer robes; another, however, involved relocating residents of a four-story South Side apartment building that had been burned down for the insurance money. The arson was obvious, Brenda said, since all of the residents, including a bedridden elderly woman, were warned to get out, and did. "That's when I began to realize that the world was not quite as rosy as I'd seen it up to that point," she recalled. It was the late 1960s and that was when my farm girl's social consciousness was really raised. I was twenty-three years old and I thought, "This can't be happening." I kept a diary while I was working there and about a year ago I found it when I was cleaning. I was astounded at the things I was writing then, my outrage and the influence it has had on what I've done since. The job with Cook County was certainly my first exposure to inner-city poverty, and to the lives of children born in that environment. In Chicago, she met and married Wayland Eheart, a chemical engineer working as a troubleshooter in oil refinery construction. She put her plans for an advanced degree on hold for the next two years as Wayland's job took them around the world. They traveled throughout Europe and South America, and then, hoping to start a family, they opted for a less nomadic life. An avid hiker and outdoorsman, Wayland's interests had shifted from the economic aspects of engineering to the environmental. He enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in Madison to get his Ph.D. in environmental engineering. Brenda completed her master's degree in home economics and earned a Ph.D. in the area of child development. While Brenda was working on her doctorate, she gave birth to her daughter, Sarah, now a teacher for behaviorally disturbed children in San Francisco. The couple completed their course work and earned their degrees in six years. They then moved to Philadelphia, where Wayland taught at Drexel University. Brenda became the instructor of an undergraduate course in child care at Temple University, and mentored her black, inner-city students as they interned with federal child welfare programs such as Head Start. During this period, she and Wayland also adopted Seth, a Peruvian Incan orphan. Their experiences with Seth, and their involvement with other parents with adopted children rekindled Brenda's interest in child welfare and the challenges of being an adoptive parent. When Wayland took a job as an environmental engineering professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana, Brenda joined the faculty as director of an interdisciplinary program that placed student interns into jobs in the child welfare system. She and another professor, Martha Bauman Power, also spent seven years closely documenting the experiences of families who attempted to adopt and nurture "special needs" children--generally older children with emotional, developmental, or physical problems; minority children; or children from a sibling group. Most of these children experienced deprivation, physical and sexual abuse, abandonment, and many moves within the foster care system. Eheart and Power worked with nearly a dozen families, and they found that many of the adoptions failed. The adoptive parents were unable to handle the deeply rooted problems of the most troubled young people. These "unadoptable" children were often institutionalized for their entire childhoods, and then sent into the world as adults destined for prison, welfare, or lives on the deadly edges of society. The two women didn't just study the activities of the foster kids and their families. They all but lived with them, developing an intimate understanding of their frustrations and fears. They concluded from their study that if special needs children are to be salvaged from the foster care system and placed in permanent foster or adoptive homes, their adult guardians needed more support than was normally available. Too often, they found, adoption was a path to disillusionment. Adoptive parents were not provided with complete medical or behavioral histories of the children they adopted, in part because the kids were bounced around so much, there was no continuity of care. As a result the children's needs went unserved. Even today, Eheart frequently gets calls from parents who feel that they've gotten in over their heads after adopting toddlers who mature into terrors because of unknown things that happened to them in their earliest months and years of life, she said. It makes you think we could be sitting on a time bomb, with all of these explosive kids in foster care and in adoptive homes. These kids come out of abuse and neglect and they are very angry. They should be angry. But to help them work it out is tough if you don't have a complete history. Working, living, and writing about those children and their families, while also raising my own daughter and son, was really a turning point for me. One of the children we studied shared my daughter's birthday. Others reminded me of my son. I kept thinking, "These could be my kids." We really became involved in the lives of those kids we studied. We followed one family when they went to court to terminate their adoption of a nine-year-old boy who'd been adopted after spending years in foster care. They couldn't handle him. Oh God, they terminated their rights and then he became suicidal. He went into a residential center, and wrote letters to the family threatening suicide. It was so sad. We saw so much. Poverty. Low-functioning mothers. A lot of abuse. Families moving constantly. Total chaos for the kids. I kept thinking there had to be a better way. I knew from my studies and from my instincts that kids need stability and a reliable support system. They don't need to be set apart. They don't need to be moved from one place to the next. I wanted for them what I'd want for my own kids if something were to happen to Wayland and me. I had the basic model, that was simple enough, but I had no idea how it could be turned into a reality. As Eheart and Power studied the lives of children in the foster care system, there was a growing national debate over child welfare. In the 1970s and into the 1980s, the number of children in foster care rose alarmingly as crack cocaine, economic recession, and cities in crisis tore at the family structure. More and more children were pouring in, and fewer were coming out. Cries for reform reached Washington, D.C., where then--Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was among those calling for the creation of government-run orphanages to house the thousands of children entering the system each month. The talk of warehousing needy young people in orphanages "put me over the edge," Eheart said. She felt increasing urgency to find a better alternative. She wasn't alone. All around her, other adoptive parents, social workers, child welfare professionals, foster families, lawyers, and academics were growing alarmed. She became part of a group of concerned central Illinois residents who met regularly to discuss alternatives and formulate strategy. "Drug-exposed babies were being featured on the covers of Time and Newsweek and that was on everybody's mind. There was a real interest in taking those children out of the foster care system," Eheart said. "We wanted to provide for kids that nobody else would take, including sibling groups, and kids who have been tossed and tossed and tossed around the system." Most of them agreed that children in foster care need stability and a consistent, nurturing relationship with at least one adult. They also agreed that parents who take in special needs children must have considerable support within easy reach. That support should include trained therapists and child welfare professionals, and also some sort of extended family network. Eheart came up with a vital component of Hope Meadows's support team while attending a speech given by Maggie Kuhn, the founder of the Gray Panthers. "She talked about a program where seniors could stay in their own homes rather than going into nursing homes, with the help of college students who looked after their needs," Eheart recalled. "After hearing her, a light went on in my mind." Eheart and her friends developed a concept whereby senior citizen volunteers would be recruited to live among the families in their child care colony. They would then support the parents there, by acting as "foster grandparents" to the troubled young people--in much the same way that Eheart's grandfather served in support of her parents on the farm. Coming up with a theoretical model was relatively easy. Funding and building it was a daunting challenge. Eheart and her circle of concerned friends had no political clout. No money. No bricks and mortar to build upon. For two years, their grassroots effort seemed unworkable economically, politically, socially, and otherwise. From time to time, they'd learn of properties that might suit their purpose, but they didn't have the means to acquire them. It seemed an impossible dream, until one day in January of 1992, when Eheart was contacted by a U.S. Air Force officer at the Chanute Air Force Base in Rantoul, just twenty miles south of the Urbana campus. The 2,400-acre base was to be closed due to Pentagon cutbacks. The officer had the seeds of an idea about using some of the former military housing to create a residential community for children along the lines of Boys Town. The woman officer had contacted the state's Department of Children and Family Services, and someone within that bureaucracy remembered a university professor with her own ideas about a new type of child welfare. After touring the property, Eheart had grand dreams of it being donated to her nonprofit foundation within a few months. Those fantasies were quickly dissipated by the local power broker she went to for assistance. "When she [Brenda] first sat down in my office and started telling me about her plans, I thought, `Oh horseshit, here we go again, another flaming liberal with a pie-in-the-sky concept," recalled attorney John Hirschfeld, who served three terms as a state representative, and also held the position of Republican Party chairman in Champaign County. It was an interesting confrontation. She is a liberal Democrat. I am a conservative Republican. Brenda told me up front that she just wanted to use my experience and contacts. She said she had never voted for me, and that she never liked me much based on what she'd read and heard about me. I thought, "I sort of like this woman." She was no shrinking violet. I don't like people who are easily intimidated. Still, I intended only to talk with her a little while and then kick her out of my office, saying I was retired from politics and didn't have the clout she thought I had. But as she talked, I got intrigued. I'd throw a barb out and she'd respond with something of her own. The fifteen-minute meeting blossomed into a two-hour conversation. And into an unusual friendship. Although he would eventually help Eheart put together a diverse coalition of supporters for her groundbreaking child care community, Hirschfeld, sixty-two, seemed at first to be an unlikely ally. Before his retirement from his law firm in 2000, he was a controversial figure in central Illinois. He'd hosted a radio talk show and written a newspaper column in which he often lambasted liberals and other political and philosophical foes. But the Notre Dame graduate and father of seven had long shown a deep and abiding interest in child welfare. He built his law firm from a one-man office to a staff of twenty primarily on the strength of his adoption law practice, much of it done for Catholic Social Services. Hirschfeld has performed legal work on thousands of adoptions in the U.S. and overseas. He was a founding member of the American Academy of Adoption Attorneys, and, over the years, has helped write and reform state adoption laws. He was not happy with the child welfare system and he found Brenda Eheart's approach intriguing. The lawyer and former politician came to see Eheart as "a visionary" who was "malleable--as long as you use a hammer." When Brenda came to me she had stars in her eyes and I tried to get her to be more realistic, but I was all for what she was trying to do. Illinois child welfare is a shambles at best. I was not at all happy with many of the state's agencies and their regulations on child welfare. The law says everything is supposed to be done in the best interests of the child. But that's not how it is working. I was particularly unhappy with foster care, in which children are shipped from household to household and warehoused. There are good child agencies and good foster homes, but my experience is that far too many foster parents were in it because they were being paid, not because they loved kids. Brenda's concept was to provide permanency for the kids. I don't know if it will answer all the problems, but it is a step in the right direction. I told her that I would do all of her legal work pro bono, but that she was going to need a lot of help politically. Brenda realized she would need state money to purchase the surplus federal property on the old Air Force base, and the support of state agencies that govern child welfare. So, her next stop was the state capital in Springfield. Her goal was to get at least $2 million in initial state funding. To help her secure the money, Eheart recruited Betsy Mitchell, a forty-six-year-old veteran of 20 years as a lobbyist who she'd known as a volunteer on adoption issues. When they first met, Mitchell told Eheart she was in for a tough fight. It was already late in the 1993 budgeting session, and then-Governor Jim Edgar was on a cost-cutting binge. Word had come down that no new programs would be funded. Aside from the political issues, Mitchell had a personal problem with Eheart's strategy. "When she told me that I'd have to work with John Hirschfeld, I stood up and said, `There's no way,'" Mitchell recalled. I have worked with a lot of Republicans, but I'm actually a Democrat in Republican clothing myself. A Lincoln Republican. I only knew John by reputation. I said, "No, no, no." I told her that she was at opposite ends of the political spectrum from him and that it would never work. But before I knew it, we were all in a meeting together and I found myself serving as the mediator between Brenda and John. It was a fascinating experience. We all fell in love with Brenda's program. She was relentless when we started making the rounds to try to sell it to the legislators. She'd buttonhole legislators in the corridors and chisel away at them. She wouldn't get embarrassed if they didn't listen to her. She'd just keep talking about the kids and what they needed and slowly they'd begin to listen to her. I'll always remember when she and John came to the first health committee hearing. The committee chairman said that they had more than fifty bills to consider along with Brenda's. He gave them five minutes each to speak. John is a former legislator and a member of the old boys' club, so they were willing to listen to him. But Brenda was a political neophyte. We were concerned that they would tune her out. She was marvelous, as it turned out. She and John ended up speaking for about forty minutes until the chairman finally cut them off and said, "I don't think we need to hear anymore." John was worried about what that meant. But all the committee members said it was a great idea. The bill was passed unanimously out of the committee. To get the financing bill for Hope Meadows approved by the entire state legislature so late in the game, Eheart and her improbable band of Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, and other allies went to work. They had to convince key legislators and the Department of Children and Family Services to support them, or at least not to fight them. Some child welfare bureaucrats within state government feared that their funding would be cut to provide money for this experimental program, so assurances and concessions had to be made. In the end, their request was cut in half--to $1 million--and it was a one-time-only appropriation as a special addition to the budget. Eheart had her start-up money, but the battle had just begun. It had been nearly two years since she'd first toured the Chanute Field properties. She'd been wrestling with the military bureaucracy since then. The Pentagon, she discovered, had never before approved the sale of surplus military property to a nonprofit organization. There was no precedent. There were no written procedures. When the military bureaucracy doesn't have guidelines, things tend to get slogged down in miles and miles of red tape, she discovered. For two years, Brenda and her supporters fought for clearance to purchase housing units on the shuttered base in Rantoul. She was growing fed up and angry. In a classic, "What the hell, it couldn't hurt" gesture, she fired off a fax to President Bill Clinton. "It said that he had come into office promising to end gridlock in the federal government but we were mired in it," she recalled. "I also told everyone to start spreading the word that we were asking for a federal inquiry into the whole thing." She got no immediate response from the White House. But to her amazement, the gates of the Pentagon suddenly opened. She won authorization to negotiate the price of the properties she wanted. In September of 1993, she and her nonprofit corporation purchased the duplexes and twenty-two acres within the former air base for $215,000. In the spring of 1994, the first Hope families moved into the renovated housing. Four months later, the first child from the foster care system arrived to live there with a family. By the summer of the year 2000, Hope Meadows had taken in more than sixty special needs children. Nearly ninety percent have stayed out of the foster care system, with most finding permanent homes with Hope families or their own relatives. In November of 1998, Hope Meadows and its creator received an Excellence in Adoption Award from President Clinton at the White House. Many other accolades have followed. Hope Meadows was featured on two Oprah shows in the summer of 2000. The talk show hostess called Eheart's alternative to the traditional child welfare system a "true haven for the lonely and forgotten" and a place where "the blending of young foster children and aging adults has created a real community filled with hope." Oprah's Angel Network presented Hope Meadows with a $50,000 grant underwritten by actor Paul Newman's charitable foundation. Although it has been hailed in the media, widely honored, and viewed as a model for the future of child welfare, Hope Meadows's continued existence is not guaranteed by any means. The state of Illinois still funds it only on a year-to-year basis and it is difficult for Eheart to be both a lobbyist and a care-provider. To ease financial concerns, she has undertaken a $10 million fund-raising effort to create a permanent endowment. In the meantime, organizations, individuals, and government groups interested in replicating her model in other parts of the country are continually knocking on her door. Two years ago, the McDonald's Corporation's Ronald McDonald Foundation offered $8 million as seed money for a nationwide program to replicate Hope Meadows under its corporate umbrella. After the first replication site was identified and developed in urban Cleveland, Eheart and the corporation's liasons agreed that perhaps they'd been too ambitious too soon with their model for child welfare. Eheart feared that the children's needs would not be well served until the model was more developed. The partnership was dissolved, but Brenda is currently weighing several other replication proposals. The creator of Hope Meadows has concerns that she may not have the physical energy to do it, but she feels morally compelled to help as many children as possible escape the systematic cruelty and injustices of the existing approach to child welfare. In some ways, I find myself an outlaw and I don't really like being an outlaw, but for me, it's just common sense that the kids' needs have to come first. I want to make sure I'm doing that for the kids we already have and will continue to have here in Rantoul before I try to replicate this model somewhere else. A heck of a lot will depend on how much energy I have. There are days when I'm really excited about replication, and days when I don't know if I could handle it if the work is anywhere near as intense as the last six years have been. Some days, I think we've done pretty well to have taken this many kids out of the foster care system and given them back their childhoods. Certain people have convinced me, though, that we have a moral obligation to keep doing this, and to try it in other parts of the country. Eheart tries to maintain a dispassionate, professional decorum when talking about her work. At first impression, she can appear to be an aloof academic, but it is a thin shield she puts up to protect herself from betraying that she cares so deeply. She is far more vulnerable than she likes to let on, her friends say. In 1984, five years before Hope Meadows was conceived, Eheart was diagnosed with advanced breast cancer. It is painful for her to talk about her extended battle with it, and she said her victory over the deadly disease had nothing to do with the creation of Hope Meadows. But her reflections on that traumatic period of her life do say something about who she is, and how much she cares. I really hate the fact that I had cancer. I hate that I was so helpless in so many ways and dependent on so many people. It goes so much against how I see myself. And I hate how much my being sick caused those I love to feel pain and anxiety. My anxiety was that I would not get to see my kids grow up. I wanted nothing more than that, and to not have that opportunity was terrifying. Maybe that is why I have so much empathy for birth parents, and these children. I've come to believe that these kids need what all kids need: a sense of security, the knowledge that somebody will always be there for them. When they come to us from foster care, or out of abuse and neglect, they don't have that. Often, they don't feel secure until they are adopted, and even then their insecurities can easily arise. Before they can heal, they need to know that they belong to a community that cares about them. We give them a community of care in the present, so they will have the memories needed to give and receive care in the future. At Hope Meadows, they have not only their parents and siblings, and other kids from similar backgrounds, but grandparents next door, and an office staff that cares about them and works as a partner with the families. One of the things I've learned is that children, and really all of us, need to experience random acts of caring in our day-to-day lives. We need to be assured and acknowledged in serendipitous and unexpected ways. The seniors at Hope talk about their spirits being suddenly lifted by the sound of a child shouting out, "Hi, Grandma!" or "Hi, Grandpa!" You hear, too, about deeply troubled kids responding to the simplest and most basic acts of caring, whether it's a tutor trying to help them learn, or a parent showing them how to shoot a basketball. Random acts of caring are vital to all of us, but especially to these kids, who often have never received the clear message that they are loved and that they matter. Here, they can get it from their parents, their siblings, their elderly neighbors, from everyone around them. In five years, we have become a community with our own history and our own traditions--summer barbecues, holiday parties, and annual trips to places like Washington, D.C., and New York City. I think these kids need that sense of community. It's not a perfect place, but it is a place where they can heal and grow. You know, we have had parents and foster grandparents here who grew up in foster care themselves and they talk about how they've struggled to overcome the sense of isolation and being unloved. I don't know how somebody raised in institutional care without role models or family relationships overcomes that and becomes an adult capable of having lasting and loving family bonds. Those of us who grew up with it take it for granted, but every day, we fall back on our childhood experiences and the values that were formed then. It really shapes us. And if you don't have a foundation, you are forced to try and create one. Some people succeed in doing that. But I think it makes life much harder. The greatest reward for me is knowing that we are helping people build relationships that nourish them--not only the kids, but the seniors and parents, too. In 1997, Brenda Eheart was named one of Ms . magazine's Women of the Year "for creating a better life for foster children and a new vision of community." She is not comfortable with such recognition, nor does she consider herself a role model or heroine. Always, she wants the focus to be on the needy children to whom she has dedicated her life. I am not any better or worse than someone who chooses to stay home every day and read books and garden. I know it is the "in" thing to say that we should all be giving something back to make the world a better place. I guess I don't believe that. I think everyone should, if they are lucky, do what they truly enjoy doing, whether it makes a difference for others or not. I was able to start Hope because my mother raised me to believe that I could do anything I really wanted to do, and I inherited from my father the ability to be comfortable with and talk to almost anyone. I also inherited a stubborn streak from him. This streak came in handy when I was fighting the Pentagon. If I could inspire others--and I'm not sure I can--I would like to see everyone try harder to live by the Golden Rule, as trite as that may sound. We try to do this at Hope when we think of our Hope kids and ask, "What would we want for our own children?" I think that would truly make the world better. Copyright © 2001 Wes Smith. All rights reserved.
