Heartland Christian Center broke ground for its Sunshine Community Center under a bleak sky in Morgan Township Friday morning, but rather than an unfortunate omen, it was a fitting tribute to the little girl it’s named for.
When Andrea Sunshine Willingham was born in Bessemer, Alabama, with Down syndrome nearly 49 years ago, the doctor handed her young mother two pieces of paper. One was for Rhonda and Phil Willingham to sign over their child to become a ward of the state, and the other was a death certificate so they could simply walk away.
“‘You tell your family and friends that your baby died,’” Rhonda said she was told. “She’ll never walk. She’ll never talk. She’ll never be potty trained and she’ll always be a burden to you,” he told her.
Instead, they took their baby home and “loved on her” and called her by her middle name, Sunshine, and enrolled her in an early development program at the age of 3, where she thrived. The only thing close to a burden was the isolation of caring for a child with special needs.
The Sunshine Center aims to alleviate that isolation by providing a place not only for special needs kids ages 3 to 21, but also for their caregivers to “have support from others going through the same thing, because sometimes you get awful lonesome,” Rhonda said.
“She’s the inspiration behind it all,” she said of her daughter. “We know what it’s like to have a child with special needs. I was 20 at the time she was born. My husband was 22.”
That young couple moved their family to Indiana 25 years ago and dreamed for a long time of providing a connection to families like theirs and a safe place to get a break and take care of their physical well-being. “We know that parents of children with special needs sometimes don’t have time for self-care,” Rhonda said.
Phil, senior pastor at Heartland, told the crowd gathered Friday that the 28,000-square-foot facility has already been seven years in the making. It will house four sensory rooms: one with a bed and kitchen that will allow for the teaching of life skills like making beds and brushing teeth, another that can host classes such as the Love and Logic classes the church regularly holds, one for sound sensitivities, and another for light sensitivities. A gym will allow for two basketball courts, indoor soccer, and an indoor track. There will be drop-down batting cages, and the space will be open to area schools.
They intend to welcome all to the space and plan sponsorships to extend access to the facility. “We’re going to build in sponsorships where no child is left out,” Phil said of programming.
“This is more of a community center with a special needs strong emphasis,” Phil said. The existing soccer fields north of the church that the community has come to know and love will remain in place on the current 15-acre campus, and the church hopes to add others as it develops the new 10.7 acres south of the church for a total of 25 acres.
The church hopes to have permits by mid-June and anticipates a total build time of nine to 12 months. The final price tag is expected to be $9 million. They’ve raised $2 million so far.
“We’re paying cash for everything,” Phil said. “That’s our goal, to have it paid for when we build it.”
He hopes the Sunshine Center will eventually be one of many. “This is not a problem that’s going to go away,” he said. “Babies are being born every day with disabilities.”
“When Sunshine was growing up, she was always going to doctors. She was always going to therapy. There was nowhere for her to go to just be a kid,” Phil said.
Shelley Jones is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
