I wish I could say that I have seen the future of foster care, and it works. What I've seen works. It's just doubtful it'll ever become the future.

"It" is a neighborhood known as Hope Meadows, a few streets' worth of late-1950s suburban housing on the former Chanute Air Force Base in Rantoul, Illinois. Over the past seven years, it has evolved into one of the most intriguing approaches in the country for dealing with kids who have had to be separated from their birth families.

Simple, But Not Easy
The idea behind it is simple."What I said to myself was, 'What if these were my kids?'" says Brenda Eheart, the woman who is responsible for Hope Meadows. "What if my husband and I died, what would we want for our kids? We'd want what we want now: Someone to raise them, to be there when they're 20 and 30 and 40, to live in a caring, diverse neighborhood."

Eheart, who is a sociologist at the University of Illinois, a half-hour south in the twin cities of Urbana-Champaign, also knew what she would not want: The system she spent years studying, in which children often bounce around from foster family to foster family before being adopted, and then run into trouble with their new families because neither they nor their families have the kind of support they need. "It was a disaster," she says. "These kids and families just fell apart."

So she set up Hope Meadows. At the moment, 11 families live there rent-free with almost 50 children, a few of them biologically their own, many of them adopted, and the rest either on their way to being adopted or in temporary foster care. The families get about $20,000 a year, plus benefits, in exchange for one parent not working.

Equally important—though Eheart didn't know this would turn out to be the case when she started—there are over 50 seniors, retirees who live in pleasant, three-bedroom duplexes for $350 a month rent in exchange for six hours a week of tutoring, babysitting, gardening or simply hanging out with the kids. There's also "the office," with a therapist, some social workers, and a few administrators.

Taken all together, they form a community, a web of adults focused on helping children—some of them with appalling pasts—find their way into a stable family life.

This may be starting to sound familiar. For a little social-service experiment out in the heartland, Generations of Hope (Hope Meadows is actually just the subdivision name) has gotten extraordinary publicity—Oprah, Rosie, People, NPR, Nightline, you name it.

Its appeal is obvious: There probably isn't a child-welfare system in the country that works the way you or I would want, or that treats children caught up in it the way we'd want our own children treated. But here's the interesting thing: Though Eheart is working hard to get more Hope Meadows started, it's been difficult, despite the publicity and despite the genuine interest of state legislators sprinkled around the country.

Beyond the "System"
There are several reasons for this, but the one that concerns us here is that Eheart's model does not fit easily into the child-welfare system. The language of child welfare alone illustrates the gulf: The Hope Meadows families are families, they're not "foster families," their children are not "wards," they do not provide "slots," they do not live in a "facility."

Hope Meadows is about adoption and normalcy, and though most child-welfare officials would say that they are, too, you'd be hard-pressed to prove it—though some states, including Illinois and Alabama, are making great progress. In too many places, though, normalcy runs counter to the financial self-interest of foster-care programs—and to the non-profit institutions that run them—in that in many states, once a child is adopted, state or county money dries up.

Then, too, there is a tendency with child welfare to look for institutional answers: If too many kids bounce from foster family to foster family, then let's set up orphanages—as legislators in Colorado and officials in southern California have recently proposed—or turn them over to some other non-profit institution.

I'm not going to pretend that Hope Meadows is the answer to our foster-care crisis. But it is certainly an answer. Too bad that looking at what it might take for a family to thrive with children adopted out of the child-welfare system so often seems beyond official imagination.

Rob Gurwitt writes about how communities grapple with change, for Mother Jones, Preservation, and Governing Magazine.