Jennifer Wright, the president and CEO of Hilltop Neighborhood House, and Amy Osburn, the nonprofit’s vice president and director, can talk almost endlessly about the horrors they witnessed across the street, at 465 College Ave. in Valparaiso.
The smell of drugs being smoked wafted from the home and drug paraphernalia was in the yard, not far from where Hilltop’s childcare participants played outside. People passed out, sometimes undressed, on the property. Constant police calls to the property forced the childcare center to go on lockout, and the coroner’s van pulled up time and again.
The kids in the childcare, Wright said, “couldn’t read, thankfully.”
Now they have a new vision for the former eyesore, a green space to develop and expand with Hilltop’s ever-growing and changing programs to meet the needs of the community.
“For years, this had been a big dream of ours that we didn’t think was possible,” said Osburn, whose two children attended Hilltop. She recalled a resident of the house across the street yelling at parents, including her, as they dropped their children off.
“It just made it an unsafe and sadly unwelcome environment,” she said.
The dream became a reality after local philanthropist Jacki Stutzman visited Hilltop with author Stephanie Jones, there to read her book about first responders, accompanied by members of the Valparaiso Police Department and one of its K-9s.
Wright took Stutzman on a tour of Hilltop, including its mission kitchen, which serves hot meals, and its food pantry, both nearby on Union Street, part of its expanding services to support the community’s needs.
Wright pointed out the house across the street from Hilltop, which is at 460 College Ave. After the tour, Stutzman said she sat in her car and thought she’d love to be able to do something for Hilltop.
Stutzman has supported many causes in the community, including the construction of the Porter County Animal Shelter and K-9s for the Valparaiso Police and Porter County Sheriff’s Department, among other entities. She said her late sister, Nancy Meyer, was a supporter of Hilltop, so it hadn’t been on her radar.
But the house was for sale and she knew the listing agent, so she had a meeting with Wright and others from Hilltop about purchasing the house for the nonprofit.
“That’s how it came about, almost by accident,” Stutzman said. “It’s kind of in a sense tying back to my sister, and it just seemed so right.”
Wright said Stutzman called her about her offer to buy the house in August, a couple of days after her tour.
“My jaw hit the ground,” Wright said. “We don’t get calls like that at Hilltop.”
Trees on the dilapidated property are already being torn down with the help of the city, which is also assisting with other aspects of demolition after asbestos testing and abatement, Wright and Osburn said.
The lot will help Hilltop double the size of its children’s community garden, Wright said, and provide an on-site location for summer camp, which Hilltop has been providing through Valpo Parks at Rogers-Lakewood Park on the city’s north side.
The house should be demolished and the land cleared by sometime in January.
“It will be grass by spring with a fence around it,” Wright said, adding the property will someday include a pavilion to provide free lunches during the summer, which is now offered at ValPlayso.
The property across the street from Hilltop is the third blighted property the nonprofit has acquired in recent years; the other two are the locations of the food pantry and the mission kitchen.
In January, Hilltop will bring on a social worker through a grant from the city of Valparaiso to handle substance abuse and prevention, as well as suicide prevention. As an addition to the mission kitchen, Hilltop will add a hunger hub, offering ready-to-eat meals around the clock through a cooler on the porch of the mission kitchen. The infrastructure is already in place for that to happen.
“The challenge has just organically changed,” Wright said, adding that generational poverty and even the closing of Valparaiso University’s law school several years ago, which saw student apartments vacated and turned into low-income rentals, have an ongoing impact on the community Hilltop serves.
Hilltop House has seen a 25% increase in the demand for its services this year, Wright said. However, during the SNAP crisis, when the government shutdown brought the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to a halt, the agency had about a 40% increase in new clients who had never come to the pantry before.
“The majority of our clients do not have cars and walk to the pantry or take the bus,” she said. “Right now, we’re feeding about 1,800 a month. The addition of the mission kitchen has definitely helped us bring more meals, hot meals to clients, and that’s about another 100 a week.”
Hilltop, Wright said, celebrated its 30th anniversary on Oct. 25. It started with childcare for low-income families and affordable healthcare in a clinic that evolved into HealthLinc. Wright became executive director at Hilltop in 2011, after two years as the director of the United Way’s Success by 6 program.
By the time Wright was at Hilltop, the nonprofit offered childcare and a small afterschool program, as well as a small food pantry in the building’s basement. Since then, its services have grown exponentially and also include a mobile food pantry and a bookmobile, in addition to the mission kitchen and food pantry.
“We have more clients than we’ve ever had,” said Osburn, who started at the agency the year before Wright did.
State funding cuts for childcare and the possibility that people receiving health insurance from the Affordable Care Act could lose their subsidies will only increase the need.
“It’s just a snowball effect,” Osburn said.
The cuts to childcare funding are of particular concern, Wright said, because childcare can sometimes cost more than rent.
“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” she said. “I don’t think it’s going to change until it affects the change makers.”
Regardless, with its growing services and a new property to expand them even more, Wright is confident Hilltop House can continue to meet the community’s needs.
“We’re ready when it happens,” she said.
alavalley@chicagotribune.com
