An Adoption Community in Western Mass

Opus

February 24, 2006

Has anyone here read Hope Meadows? It is the story of an planned community in Central Illinois, set up at a long closed Army base, it offers affordable housing and supportive services for foster/adoptive families from the state system and senior citizens. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it.

Treehouse at Easthampton Meadow is modeled after Hope Meadows. I first heard about it a few years ago when in was in its conceptual stage. I'm glad to hear its coming to fruition.

ADRIAN WALKER
Fostering community
By Adrian Walker, Globe Columnist | February 23, 2006

Judy Cockerton has been a teacher, a toy store owner, and since 1999, the mother of two adopted daughters.

With her Treehouse project she is adding urban planner to her rsum.

Treehouse at Easthampton Meadow hopes to bring together prospective adoptive and foster parents, children in state custody awaiting adoption, and senior citizens in a planned community in Western Massachusetts. It is now under construction and is accepting applications for residents in Easthampton.

''Once I had two beautiful girls in my life, they basically took me by the hand and led me into the world of child welfare," Cockerton said last week.

The Sharon mother came to realize that there are hundreds of children in custody of the Department of Social Services waiting to be adopted at any given time. The older they are, the more difficult it is to place them.

And although Cockerton isn't eager to talk about it, the sad fact is that such adoptions often fail. Social workers talk about how such children ''bounce" from placement to placement, becoming less resilient with each new family, every fresh rejection. ''I realized kids needed to be out of care and connected to families," Cockerton said.

The fate of the 11,000 children in foster care has been much in the public consciousness lately. The Department of Social Services has recently announced that it wants to begin returning hundreds of them to their communities -- a noble goal, perhaps, but one that alarms people who don't trust the agency's judgment about who is and isn't ready to live in their communities.

Treehouse is modeled on Hope Meadows, a planned community 120 miles south of Chicago founded by a former social worker that has combined families and seniors. The intergenerational approach, besides mimicking a real neighborhood, is said to provide more support for parents, a sort of re-creation of the old extended family.

Even as the idea began to crystallize, that left the issues of where to put it and how to pay for it.

Western Massachusetts, it turns out, has a disproportionately high number of children in state care. It has 11 percent of the voting population, but 22 percent of the children in care. It also had some available real estate.

Acting Governor Jane M. Swift turned over a plot of surplus state land for the cause, and DSS Commissioner Harry Spence connected Cockerton with a development firm, The Beacon Cos., that could help take the plan from notion to fruition. Currently, 12 houses and 48 senior apartments are under construction. Many houses are expected to follow, as well as a big red barn expected to serve as a hub of community activity.

''I feel that despite everybody's best efforts it's so hard to create those permanent situations that really work," said Carolyn Burns of the Berkshire Center for Children and Families. ''The beauty of Treehouse . . . is that it is not just creating a place where foster children belong, but where the adoptive parents that care for them can have support."

That's certainly what Jim and Rita Donovan are hoping. The couple, who live in Burlington, are planning to become Treehouse pioneers. They've been married for eight years and have been talking about adoption ever since they learned that they couldn't have children on their own. ''I think it's really important to have a community to support you in this process. It's not easy," Rita Donovan said. ''I think going through this with other families is a benefit."

They said they are open to adopting siblings, and Jim Donovan believes their adoptive child, or children, will choose them, more than other way around. Even if they weren't going to be part of a start-up development, theirs would be a leap into the unknown, a fact that doesn't seem to bother them a bit.

''There's a power in a loving family that transcends a lot of the conventional criteria of a biological family," Jim said. ''Love does a lot."