Foster care to farm: Ruth Project expands in DeKalb County

SYCAMORE – The Ruth Project, an organization that aims to give love and help to children in foster care and the families that take them in, has expanded to a 33-acre farm at the corner of Sycamore, DeKalb and Cortland.

The founder and executive director of the Ruth Project, Tammy McMahan, who’s fostered more than 23 children, said she and her family privately bought the Sycamore property and began residing there in April 2023, so the 501(c)(3) nonprofit could use the 33-acre farm as a place to facilitate events for a community of foster families.

“Here – it was purposeful – was our second step. And that was to purchase the farm so that we could do ongoing events and support the families. Whether individually – so we’ll have events here that will just have one family and we’ll have them over for dinner,” Tammy McMahan said. “And we’ve had over 300 Ruth dinners ... and we’ve only been here for three months.”

There are about 20,000 children in foster care in Illinois – 85% of those children are 12 years old or younger – according to Let it Be Us, a foster care and adoption advocacy group in Illinois; and there currently are 391,000 children in foster care in the U.S., according to data compiled by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Administration for Children and Families and the Children’s Bureau.

The land acquisition in DeKalb County is an expansion from the project’s first step – an Elgin-based storehouse, where foster families are able to pick out free clothes and toys for all of their children.

Elgin storehouse manager Ashley McMahan – Tammy McMahan’s daughter – said the shop is open by appointment only and operates as a free store, but with tags on the clothes so that the children being helped won’t further question their circumstances.

“So it looks like a real store, because we don’t want it to look like a secondhand store – not that there’s a problem with that but just that for these kiddos that are coming in we want to them to have their dignity restored to them – as often times they come in with nothing,” said Ashley McMahan, 23. “So the storehouse has been a really special place where kids get to come in, their eyes open, they’re able to really pick what they want and have autonomy over that.”

Tammy McMahan said she believes there’s an assumption that families can profit off of children in foster care, but she emphasized that is not the case.

“The storehouse really is to take care of the first thing that’s practical. You know when you go to get your foster license they ask you, they say, ‘Are you ready to take on this financial burden’ because they tell you, you’re only going to get 50% of what it takes to take care of a child,” Tammy McMahan said.

The Ruth Project also seeks to build a community for the children in foster care, but also for the families that take them in. Tammy McMahan said the nonprofit has more than 700 volunteers and increasingly needed a space to host large and small events.

Now, the organization has multiple heated barns and farm buildings, a greenhouse, shade from 1,000 sugar maple trees and rows of growing corn stalks. Tammy McMahan said the farm still has a contract to grow food in 2023 but isn’t sure if that will continue in the future. However, animals will continue to be a staple of the farm, including a lamb, ducks, free range chickens, Rudy the highlander cow and a donkey named Ruthie.

Tammy McMahan said the Ruth Project takes its name from the Book of Ruth in the Bible, because of the story’s themes of caring for the poor and giving to the needy in one’s community. The project’s mission is to give foster children abundant love, and that’s done by supporting and giving relief to their foster families.

“If we’re able to enable support a foster family to stay in it in the long haul, then they are in turn providing more love and better care for those kiddos,” Ashley McMahan said.