Today we’d like to introduce you to Susan McConnell.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Susan. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I am a professional photographer and opened one of the first woman owned photography studios in my area 2005. As a mother of 4 children, 3 by adoption, I was drawn to photographing children and one of my first clients was the State of Illinois, and my role for them was to photograph children available for adoption. The photographs were displayed on the Heart Gallery of Illinois – an on line photography and story exhibit of children available for adoption.
What I saw were beautiful, adoptable children that waited and waited to no avail. They simply never became adopted and they aged out of foster care into the abyss, never to have the lifelong support system of a family and never to become all that they were meant to be. Never to have a mother, or a father. When my own children were grown and my husband and I became parents of free range young adults, I started a nonprofit to help these children become adopted. I named the nonprofit Let It Be Us so that my efforts would be open to anyone who wanted to work with me to design customized solutions to this need that is so unmet in Illinois and, frankly, around the country.
I like to say that Let It Be Us is my 5th child, and she is now about to turn 3 years old. In those 3 years I have recruited a professional board of directors, all of whom are connected to adoption and foster care, and all who donate their time and talent pro bono. Together we have made inroads to the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services and forged connections and bonds with those who have the same goals of adoption for these children as we do, however their work is constrained by the financial problems in Illinois and the lack of technology that a healthy budget can afford. Let It Be Us has committed donors, most who are also connected to adoption and foster care, and their commitment to our work has allowed us to work with DCFS and the many foster care licensing agencies throughout the state to creatively help these all but forgotten children become adopted.
Our website – www.LetItBeUs.org – is home to the Heart Gallery of Illinois – the state’s photography and story exhibit of children awaiting adoption from foster care. Where the State of Illinois has only ever had up to 10 children on the Heart Gallery, under our care, and with the help of volunteer photographers throughout the state, we now have 50 children listed. I predict that by the end of 2018 we will have 100 children listed on the Heart Gallery of Illinois on our website.
In Illinois you need a foster care license and you need to foster a child for 6 months before you can adopt him or her. Let It Be Us recruits new foster parents into a system that simply doesn’t have enough of them through our groundbreaking events called Finding Forever Families Events. We host these recruitment events around the State, targeting areas that are particularly lacking foster parents, like Chicago, Waukegan, Joliet and Champaign. We put case workers and adoption recruiters on a panel and then we fill the room with potential parents. While no one has ever recruited like this, all it takes is creativity, time and effort because the truth is there are more potential parents than there are children. At Let It Be Us we are bridge builders and not only have we built the bridge, we are constantly fortifying it.
We have other programs at Let It Be Us that help children in foster care, like “Project Dignity” that provides duffle bags full of new school supplies and care items to children as they enter the foster care system. We are also beginning a new program called “Home for the Holidays” where we recruit families to provide a home to children in foster care who have entered college but need homes during the holidays when the dorms are closed.
I have dedicated my life and my career to Let It Be Us and I find that my passion and interest in helping these children secure a lifelong family deepens every day. When you give a child a family you not only save them and help them become all they can be, you benefit generations to come.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
The road to building Let It Be Us has been smooth in that people who love our mission of adoption and education of children in Illinois foster care readily work alongside us. We believe that we are the only nonprofit in this space and that’s a great place to be. Our road has been rocky because we needed to have the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services on our side and that is a big system that was hard to crack. We were fortunate that very early on we met the lead Guardian Ad Litem – a woman who is ultimately in charge of all of the children in Illinois foster care – and she ushered us in and shepherded us through until we met the people that we needed to work with and help.
I’ll never forget the day I first spoke with her on the phone. Since I started Let It Be Us, I built our first website and wrote the content for the site and for our blog. I made a blog post that said that one day we would curate the Heart Gallery of Illinois – the photography and story exhibit of children awaiting adoption. This was a bold move, because I had no idea how I was going to make this happen. Our early work at Let It Be Us was receiving a great reception and I felt emboldened.
When my phone rang with the unknown number that simply said “Chicago,” I answered it and the woman asked if I was Susan McConnell. After a few more questions she put the Guardian Ad Litem on the phone and we were introduced. Here’s how the conversation went:
Her: So, you want to have the Heart Gallery of Illinois on your website?
Me: Yes, I do. We are collecting an audience of foster parents and adoptive parents across the State of Illinois, and it’s growing every single day. I know that if I can connect the children with the parents – build the bridge – and that we can help these children become adopted. (Note that Illinois is home to approximately 17,000 children in foster care and 54% will never return home and that on any given day there are 1,000 children in need of adoption.)
Her: Well then, I need to help you. When can we meet?
I took my team to meet her and she was so important that we had to go through two security clearances. We sat at a big conference table, waiting, and she eventually walked through a door, sat down with us, and we’ve been great friends and coworkers ever since. Whenever I come across a closed door or some type of difficulty, she is always there to help me build what has become one of the most important bridges in Illinois.
Please tell us about Let It Be Us.
I have a BS and an MBA from Chicago’s DePaul University. My family is full of entrepreneurs who love startups. My friend group is full of dedicated people who work at nonprofits. I have worked pro bono for nonprofits for years and have proudly collected 4 awards for volunteer of the year. I combined my passion for business and philanthropy to start Let It Be Us.
I am the Executive Director of Let It Be Us and I now oversee a team of experts in marketing, fundraising, grant writing, and volunteer management. I am most proud of Let It Be Us because we are the only nonprofit customizing solutions to solve problems within the world of foster care and adoption in Illinois. It’s important to tackle the problems that we do because, according to a study completed by the University of Chicago, if a child is not adopted out of foster care:
1. 45% of the girls become pregnant by age 19.
2. A huge percentage of the boys end up in prison – Illinois does not have a statistic – in California the statistic is that 72% of the boys end up in prison.
And, for a child growing up in foster care:
1. Only 50% receive a high school degree.
2. 97% never get to college.
My expertise is in digital marketing, social media, photography and writing. I was able to start Let It Be Us by building a website and creating a blog and tying it all to social media. In 3 years we have grown to the point where we are able to make a significant difference in the lives of the most vulnerable population in Illinois – children in foster care, especially those awaiting adoption.
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
If I had to start over I would do a few things differently:
1. I would make my board of directors larger. We have 9 on our board of directors and our board is so knowledgeable and so helpful I wish I had more of them. I’m in the process of trying to talk my current board into enlarging.
2. I wish I would have tried to find funding before I started Let It Be Us because starting a nonprofit on a shoestring is difficult, to say the least. I have had to put in crazy hours, 50-60 per week, and I feel that I could have gotten further sooner if I had help. My board has been helpful, but it’s been only recently that we’ve been able to hire some part time people to help.
3. I wish I had the oomph of PR, like a Chicago Tribune article, at the very beginning of this nonprofit so that we could have informed Illinois of our existence sooner and had everyone on our side from the start.
4. We are in the process, as a result of a grant from Allstate, of having our website optimized so that we have better search engine optimization. That will help us a lot and would have helped us a lot in the very beginning.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.LetItBeUs.org
- Email: susanmcconnell@letitbeus.org
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/letitbeus
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/letitbeus
- Twitter: www.twitter.com/letitbeus
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