ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, February 13, 1996 TAG: 9602130119
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: RANTOUL, ILL.
SOURCE: MATT KELLEY ASSOCIATED PRESS
note: below
At Hope Meadows, families get free housing and an $18,000 salary for one parent to stay home and take care of the kids. Retired people get reduced rent for doing all sorts of things, from reading to the children to working as school crossing guards.
The government-subsidized community, set up at an abandoned Air Force base, operates according to the African proverb ``It takes a village to raise a child.''
The project is aimed at kids who have suffered from the abuse and addictions of their biological parents. The 22 ``Hope children'' are those in state custody who are older or have special medical or behavioral problems that make them hard to place elsewhere.
The Hope Meadows residents, along with child-welfare workers and volunteers, are building a community focused on serving children.
``It's going to make a lot of difference in a lot of people's lives,'' said Debbie Calhoun, who has seven children in her family's home - two foster children, four adopted children and her biological daughter.
Calhoun said she and her husband, Ken, decided to move to Hope Meadows when it opened in 1994 because of the program's promise of a stable, long-term family setting for foster and adopted children.
Hope Meadows is the brainchild of University of Illinois child psychologist Brenda Krause Eheart. She became concerned about the growing number of children raised in foster care, group homes or other ``temporary'' arrangements.
``We have about 50,000 children in foster care in Illinois, and about one-third - over 15,000 - will not go home and will not be adopted,'' she said. ``No wonder the system is failing, when we don't have a legal means of providing stable families. We can't just let kids flounder for five years or 10 years.''
While Eheart was searching for a solution, the Pentagon decided to close Chanute Air Force Base in Rantoul, a town 20 miles north of the university campus in Urbana. After a long battle with military officials and a fax to President Clinton, Eheart's Hope for the Children charity in 1993 became the first nonprofit group to get surplus military housing.
``I wanted to create my own community, with the child in the center of the community. I had no money, nothing. I was crazy,'' Eheart said with a laugh.
A $1 million grant from the state helped buy and renovate the former Chanute duplexes, and yearly state funding of about $650,000 pays most of the program's bills, Eheart said.
Once the program is running at full capacity of about 40 children, the costs are expected to be about half of the $30,000 per year it takes to raise a child in a group home now.
The idea, Eheart said, is to create a community diverse in age, race, religion, family income and legal status of children.
Hope Meadows residents say it's working.
``Several of the children have done a complete turnaround,'' said Elmer Davis, a retiree who moved to Rantoul from Florida to join the program. ``One boy, Joe [another volunteer] caught him spitting on us, but now he's turned around 100 percent. He's polite, a nice kid now.''
Still, Hope Meadows is not Utopia. Several children continue to act up in school and defy authority. Helping those children takes a lot of patience, courage and love, parents say.
``You have to be really committed to do something like this,'' said Beverly Gardner, who with her husband, Larry, is raising four Hope children. ``It isn't easy, but what makes it easier is there are so many other people who are doing the same thing.''
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