At a glance from the street, this Rockford home is nothing out of the ordinary.

Sitting atop 5 acres, deer and wild turkeys frolic amid autumnal foliage on the property, giving the feel of a Norman Rockwell poster.

A telescope stands in the living room in case anyone wants to look at the stars; a gym and sauna are in an adjacent room where one can work out; and across the way sits a kitchen large enough to have a number of sous chefs when the meal dictates. Bedrooms are sanctuaries, with the basement a place to gather for fun, thanks to a three-in-one pool/ping-pong/air hockey table.

Welcome to Hope House, a model of fostering children and teens developed by the Chicago-based nonprofit One Hope United. The premise: A stable household with a built-in support team to help those in foster care thrive. The twist: It’s a new take on the adage “It takes a village.”

Four boys ages 13 to 17 live with their foster parents, a full-time therapist and nurse, and two youth-care workers who help them with homework, drive them to school and chaperone outings.

Hope House is designed to be ordinary — a place where normalcy reigns — like other caring households with children, according to Executive Director Josie Bayona.

It’s where parents are concerned about their children’s well-being and invest in their rearing. Where movie nights are held, video games played and schoolwork and housework are juggled.  It’s where families debrief their days around the dinner table, whether it’s taco Tuesday or pizza Friday. And where rewards follow completed tasks, and responsibility and respect factor into their days.

This nurturing setup promotes a new kind of family, providing youth with unconditional care and the tools they need to thrive and prosper as adults in society, Bayona said.

Her message with Hope House: Stop giving up on our kids. Rethink how we look at child welfare and juvenile justice and stop putting the kids in a box that they don’t belong in. “A young man coming in today could be the future principal of a high school. Give him the same opportunity, the same credit you would someone who’s not in the system of care.”

Care begins at home

One Hope United launched the first Hope House in Florida in 2020. Since then, the 130-year-old Loop-based nonprofit has opened 11 residences in Florida.

The first Illinois residence, for girls, opened in Rockford in June, a home for boys followed in December. Two more locations, one for boys, another for girls, are in downstate Champaign.

Hope House aims to address the faults in a foster care system that is centered around children living in facilities and at a loss with kids who are tagged with behavioral problems. Ultimately, the goal is to also correct the often-negative aftermaths of aging out of the system.

It’s estimated that there are 328,963 children in the U.S. child welfare system, according to the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System’s most recent report, covering fiscal year 2024.

Illinois is second only to California in the highest number of foster care placements, according to AFCARS data. Youth ages 1 to 5 are the majority in care, while ages 11 to 16 follow.

On any given day, among the over 70% of cases in the child protective services system involving neglect, many are poverty-related. And it’s even more so for those who are Black and brown, said Darcey Merritt, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice.

“There’s a pipeline from schools to prisons, a pipeline from foster care to prisons and the stigma and the emotional harm is devastating,” Merritt said.

With over 20 years of experience as a social worker and practitioner, Merritt has placed children in the foster care system after removal from their biological homes. Separation from one’s place of comfort continues trauma, Merritt explained. Seeing the aftermath of displacement on children in her work, Merritt said the debate in the field is, “Do we abolish the system? Are we protecting children from abuse, or placing them in a different level and circumstance of surveillance?”

Merritt suggested throwing support and resources into the communities where the children live is a better solution, “… rather than our goal being ‘How can we make life better for them once we take them away?’”

On average, youths have been in 19 different foster placements before coming to Hope House. But once they are there, 96% of Hope House youths kept a stable placement while in care, according to data from OHU’s 2025 fiscal year.

Jenna (the Tribune is withholding her last name to protect her privacy) entered a Florida-based Hope House in the fall of 2023 at age 15 after stints in a foster home and a group home.

Initially, Jenna was reluctant because the foster living environments she knew looked unkempt and institutional. But Hope House was “single-family home clean,” with “real” furniture, Jenna recalled. “When you walked in, you couldn’t tell this is a foster home. It didn’t feel like that,” she said.

Living at Hope House at first was too much for Jenna, and she didn’t like the rules, she said. “My biggest thing was school. I wasn’t going … I gave up on myself … checked out in my 11th grade year,” she said.

But Hope House staff like Chuck Metellus Sr. convinced Jenna and helped her earn her high school diploma through Penn Foster, an online high school program.

Jenna hit other milestones while at Hope House, including earning her Florida driving learner’s permit, getting a part-time job, and celebrating her “sweet 16” birthday (complete with a queen’s chair, sash and crown).

It turned out to be one of the best birthdays Jenna had, she said. “I didn’t even think I was gonna have a sweet 16 … It was one of the big, important things that I wanted to happen, and Chuck made it happen.”

Metellus, director of programs at One Hope United and a licensed clinical social worker, served as a house parent for the Florida team for one week each month. Metellus, who has been with Hope House since October 2020, laid out how the Hope House model is more of a home than a facility.

For starters, there’s the name. Staff and residents refer to Hope House as a “family home” rather than a foster home or group home.  And they prioritize the children’s existence and identity rather than their placement, Metellus said.

Staff also don’t refer to the youths who live there as “foster kids,” he said. “They are just kids.” Hope House residents are encouraged to refer to it as a “family home” rather than a foster home or group home.

Hope House staff also offer support outside the house. Metellus and Bayona regularly speak with Hope House residents’ caseworkers and advocate in court on their behalf. It’s all about ensuring the kids have a healthy balance of nurture, structure and normalcy, as well as advocacy, Metellus said.

Hope House provided a venue where Jenna’s mother, Faith, could reconnect with her on “family days” — a designated time when parents and approved relatives visit to cook and share a meal with their loved ones.

Since Jenna wanted to reunite with her mother, who battled addiction for years, and her brother, now 16, they visited every other week. The goal was to have as much family engagement as possible so that Jenna would eventually transition out of Hope House successfully, he added, and she did.

Faith said supervised visits at Hope House helped bring the family dynamic back together.

“When we met Chuck, it was a breath of fresh air. I finally had someone that gave me the chance to show who I wanted to be and who I really was. I was able to do that and able to sit down with my daughter and work through our issues.”

These days, Jenna is looking toward college, trying to figure out where her career passions lie, and starting to save up for a car.

“When I first got there, I was a broken kid that thought everybody was there for the money, then I realized there are people in the system that want to change the system,” Jenna said. “It changed my whole perspective. I felt like I was in a home that really cared about me, always uplifted me.”

Working to identify the whys

One Hope United believes the success of Hope House lies within the relationships. Staff are trained on and use trust-based relational intervention, or TBRI, a therapeutic approach designed specifically for children who have experienced trauma in their family relationships and behavioral challenges. To help the youth residents heal and thrive, establishing connections and fostering empowerment are vital. They are given life skills and tools to advocate for themselves, and while they are held accountable for their actions, behavior is corrected in a nurturing way, not punitively. The Hope House team works with them on fixing problems together, with the youth leading the way.

With TBRI, Hope House staff get to the need behind the behavior. “We work to identify the whys,” Bayona, the executive director, said.

Over the past 20 years, many experts in the field have found that “wrap-around” treatment approaches like that of Hope House — evidence-based interventions, mentoring, coaching, skills development — are crucial, according to Mary Sue Morsch, a fellow at Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, who for decades has worked in child welfare in Illinois and other jurisdictions.

“You should be wrapping things around the child and the family, in a supportive environment,” she said. “The more we can try stuff that’s grounded in evidence and best practices, the better off everybody’s going to be.”

Bayona is doing her best to turn that into a reality, now that the model is in Illinois. To determine whether the Hope House experience provides greater stability and better career prospects and social relationships, the outcomes of youth residents in Illinois will be collected, analyzed and then compared with those of traditional placements over the next year and a half. The project, launched earlier this month, is a partnership between One Hope United, the Jane Addams School of Social Work at the University of Illinois, and researchers at Florida State University and NORC at the University of Chicago. One Hope United and its partners expect to make the case for replicating the Hope House model nationwide.

While One Hope United did not provide an exact price tag for Hope House, with its additional layers of support, staffing and clinical oversight, the cost lies somewhere between the roughly $1,206 per child, per month, for traditional foster care placement and the roughly $14,700 for institutional group care based on data from a 2023 rate study by the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services.

The goal: Youth are referred to Hope Houses by DCFS and the homes themselves are established in places where a need exists, according to Dennis Delgado, executive director of community-based family support and Illinois residential services. Hope House youth are individuals already in care and identified by DCFS. The children may be in a residential facility or coming from another disrupted placement.

This year, a fifth home in southern Illinois is in the works. The homes are usually outside city centers for safety, community and new beginnings, while still being in close proximity to the youths’ families and medical practitioners.

Next on One Hope United’s plan is extended foster care for those aged 18 to 21, in a place meant to encompass the essence of Hope House, providing support and structure for young adults.

“I see the child welfare system as a race track, but Hope House is a pit stop to reset,” Delgado said. If youth who age out of the system at 18 get back on the race track, the cycle continues, he said. “We want to make sure this is going to have a lasting impact.”