The woman with her name on the marquee in front of the new Jerri Hoffmann Child + Family Center in Carpentersville recalled Monday that when she and future husband David Hoffmann were growing up in a small town in Missouri, his family didn’t even have hot water plumbing.
“Like so many Americans, Dave and I grew up with very little,” Hoffmann said after she led a class in singing. “I went to his house and asked why they had this big pan on the stove. They said that was their only source of hot water.”
She said that after they graduated from high school, married and moved to the Chicago area, David Hoffmann made the family fortune by starting an executive recruiting firm and a private equity firm.
Jerri Hoffmann said she and her husband live in Winnetka and had little past connection with the Fox Valley. But for 14 years she has been a longtime member of the Children’s Home + Aid Board of Trustees. So when the organization decided to replace its Tom Thumb Community Child Care Center with a big new facility and calculated that $10 million would be needed to build it, David Hoffmann kicked off the fundraising campaign with a “lead gift” of $1.2 million. The board then voted to name the new center for his wife.
About $5 million of the rest came from a state capital development grant and the balance is being raised from other private donations.
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After a land swap, the new center was built on a seven-acre site that formerly held Algonquin-based School District 300’s Oak Ridge School. The school district gave that site to Children’s Home + Aid. It gave the school district the Tom Thumb building, which is next door to District 300’s Parkview Elementary School.
District 300 officials are thinking about using the Tom Thumb building for students with out-of-school suspensions, for adult continuing education classes or as a community center.
Children’s Home + Aid spokesman Jassen Strokosch said the Jerri Hoffmann Center begins with an enrollment of about 100 children, which was about the entire capacity of the Tom Thumb Center. The Jerri Hoffmann Center is designed to accommodate 230 children.