There's no place like home

By Scott Schultz
Executive director

Home can mean a little something different to everyone, but you always know when you find it.

That sense of home – of place – sometimes is in more than one location. In my case, what I know as home always will be on the farmland at the place called Veefkind, in central Wisconsin. But I knew I also found home the moment I stepped into the old farm house at the Eimon Homestead in the Driftless Area’s northern reaches.

Since living in the old Eimon house, my wife Dee and I have learned much about its history of inspiring people to appreciate art, read, write and appreciate all the wonders presented by the area’s ridges and coulees.

Dee and I purchased the farm with the intent of sharing those wonders as part of the mission of The Heartbeat Center for Writing, Literacy and the Arts, which is the nonprofit educational organization we founded. We had visions of people from near and far arriving at the farm to allow those wonders to inspire them in writing and arts projects we presented here.

But, as with so many things in life, we allowed our dream for the farm to be sidetracked by other ideas and temptations placed before us. We tried to take The Heartbeat Center to places not fitting with its mission and to do things with it that drained us financially and emotionally.

People who understand the land’s powers will know what I mean when I write that the land has since talked with me. The land said we’ve been foolishly wasting our time and money on those other places when this is home.

The land reminded me how this farm – the one we purchased for The Heartbeat Center – always has been tread upon by generations of people who so valued all that we intend to do with The Heartbeat Center.

Home for us also means home for The Heartbeat Center. We’ve gotten the message.

There’s much that we need to get done with the farm’s facilities to make our home more usable for The Heartbeat Center projects, though. That’s why we decided to ask folks to use those new crowd-source funding projects to help raise money needed to make the needed improvements.

Earlier this summer I read about a fellow in Ohio who used a crowd-source funding program to ask people to donate a few dollars so he could learn to make a potato salad for his dinner. That request has raised more than $35,000 – most of which the fellow said he will donate to charity. I point that out because it reminded me how anything is possible when many people chip in a little something to help with a project.

In the meantime, the first writing and arts projects are getting under way here at the farm as we look forward to making those needed facilities improvements.

Please go to http://gofundme.com/clvquw and consider helping.

To find out more about our programs and who we are, visit our recently re-designed web page at http://theheartbeat.us

The Heartbeat Center has found its way home. Your help will assist many people in their quest for home – place – and, in many ways, will benefit our communities.