Treehouse Foundation: Living the Dream
By Melissa Karen Sances | Community Corner
Published in Northampton Living April 2025
COMMUNITY CORNER SPONSORED BY GREENFIELD SAVINGS BANK
Imagine a community where kids are fostered into an extended family – and where older adults find new purpose in mentoring today’s youth. Think about it: Parents could have a built-in support system. Retirees could inform the next generation. Foster children could know boundless love.
Treehouse's third annual Runway 5K will take place on May 4.
It sounds dreamy, doesn’t it? For the Treehouse Foundation, it was a necessary fantasy, a vision of what the foster care system should look like in Massachusetts. In 2002 the organization vowed to build an intentional, intergenerational community from the ground up. The child welfare system was woefully ineffective; other than social workers and foster parents, no one was stepping up to take care of kids in need. So in 2006, Treehouse’s first community – Treehouse at Easthampton Meadow – became a reality.
“In an ideal world, kids would have access to more than one person in their life to meet a variety of needs,” says Erika Kuester, Treehouse’s new chief executive officer. Over the years, the nonprofit has found that their ideal community is comprised of about 120 people, with a roughly 4 to 1 ratio of older adults to foster children and their families. Now Kuester is extending the organization’s reach. Plans are in the works for six sites to be under development by 2030.
Cultivating Community
Purposeful connections are at the heart of Treehouse’s successful model. Chief Program Officer Ann Augustine notes that trauma specific to foster care is healed in community. “Most people remember a person they were connected to and supported by,” says Augustine, reflecting on her own experience with adoption. "Thinking about my foster mother Nona still touches my heart. I imagine how much she and my adoptive parents would have benefited from this community."
Treehouse children remain with their adoptive families through adulthood. One hundred percent pursue education after high school – a number 10 times the national average. And Kuester notes that the community’s older adults feel rewarded by their ambitious mission to help raise the next generation.
On an 11-acre campus in Easthampton, 12 townhouses for adoptive families and 48 cottages for older adults are situated along well-worn paths that converge on a green common. The community center is Treehouse’s hub, where members plaster the door with flyers about soup nights, neighborly teas and open mics. Through an alliance with the Arts Integration Studio in Holyoke, some members of the community participate in the Truth Tellers Theater Ensemble to illuminate the nuances of the child welfare system and elicit change. The ensemble performs locally as well as for policy makers at the Massachusetts State House each May.
Extending Their Runway
Treehouse has another meaningful partnership with the Northampton Airport, which hosts the organization’s annual Runway 5K fundraiser. This year’s uniquely intergenerational and accessible race will take place on Sunday, May 4. Treehouse anticipates that 400 people will run or walk, and you can join them here: treehousefoundation.org/runway5k.
“This idea that we are all responsible for each other,” says Augustine, “at Treehouse it’s aspirational” – and being actualized. Kuester says this is the dream: “Our vision is that every child will be rooted in family and community.”
For more information on Treehouse, visit treehousefoundation.org
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