When I launched Child Advocacy 360 Foundation and its news service in 2007, one of our first Who’s Doing What That Works stories was about Hope Meadows, the multi-generational community in Rantoul, Illinois created by Brenda Krause Eheart, Martha Bauman Power, Carolyn Casteel and a small group of like-minded friends. Hope Meadows creates a stable, extended family network for children moving from foster care to adoption. (CFK featured Hope Meadows in an October 2008 article, “Hope” Grows: an Intergenerational Community, 14 Years On.)

In our content partnership with Connect for Kids, Child Advocacy 360 has continued to track their progress. Generations of Hope, the nonprofit that administers Hope Meadows, recently expanded its intergenerational approach to include helping single mothers leaving prison reunite with their children in a caring multi-generational support environment. It is a brave experiment with high promise.

I learned, when I called Brenda Eheart recently, that she had just been selected to receive the prestigious Heinz Award in the Human Condition for "finding a solution to the nation's confounding issue of foster care adoption." Congratulations, Brenda.

And now, my sense of Lessons Learned in brief—followed by links to some first class video reports about Hope Meadows on recent progress.

• The beauty of the Hope Meadows multigenerational model is that it is so appealingly connected to our aspirations for healthy and productive children and families. To replicate Hope Meadows per se would be a huge challenge, and there are many multigenerational, community-based initiatives that stop short of a 24-hour a day support environment, but nonetheless deliver concrete results for child-youth-family development.
• When I see the outcomes achieved at Hope Meadows, I ask, How can we do something like that in my town? I don’t mean replicate Hope Meadows, necessarily, but rather make a difference. In a sense, Hope Meadows is a metaphor, an agent of inspiration. Just show me the video, not mountains of paper and process, and I can find a way to borrow what’s appropriate.
• A good friend in the area of low-cost housing development recently asked whether we could help develop a multigenerational program suitable for one of his housing projects, perhaps as a model for others. I told him about Hope Meadows, sent him a link to several videos, and we are now in the planning stage for an after-school and weekend program that holds promise for making a difference. There it is—Communication as Catalyst—in action.

The promised links:

Generationsofhope.org. Scroll to bottom of page, where you will find an easy segue’ to selected video/film clips of Hope Meadows in action.

Also, our recent Scorecard story on Hope Meadows—quantifying success – (LINK)

Other websites featuring Generations of Hope

The following sites provide some excellent in-depth background material on Hope Meadows, including video and other multi-media presentations:

NBC Nightly News: "Making a Difference"

W.K. Kellogg Foundation: "Three Generations of Hope"

Wall of America Foundation: American Mural Project (click on Illinois in the map)

Civic Ventures:"Hope Meadows: Raising a Neighborhood"

A Postscript

I frequently find myself citing two paragraphs from the General Philosophical Principles document published by Generations of Hope Development Corporation. Hoping you may find them useful:

1. Viewing residents through a positive lens
   GHC residents, including those whose social challenge provides the organizing focus of the community, must not be viewed as problems-to-be-managed, but as ordinary people requiring the same embeddedness in family and community that we would want for ourselves. All residents (children, adults, and older adults) must be viewed as if they were members of our own family and decisions must be made accordingly.
2. The enduring capacity of the individual to care
   Given the opportunity, ordinary people of all ages and vulnerabilities will care for one another in ways, and to a degree, that go beyond the scope of traditional interventions. It is these caring relationships that shift the focus of problem-solving from professional service providers to the members of the community. There must be an emphasis on individual strengths and a belief in everyone's capacity to care for themselves and others.