Barrington nonprofit connects adoptive parents with foster children

TOWER LAKES – When a stranger asks which country Carolyne Osterhues adopted any of her four children are from, she laughs.

That's because her children were born and raised in Illinois.

In a move that to some seems like more of a foreign concept than international adoption, Osterhues, 44, built her family by adopting through the state's foster care system. She's done building, but the Tower Lakes mother would like to see more would-be adoptive parents follow her lead in finding children within their own state.

“People get afraid of these children, but if they are in a stable environment, they just flourish,” Osterhues said. “They want stability, and they want to know you're going to be there for them.”

Osterhues is part of a growing local movement to place children in foster care with families. Barrington mother Susan McConnell recently launched a nonprofit called Let It Be Us that is aimed at bridging the gap between parents who want to adopt and the thousands of children available in Illinois' foster care system.

About 3,300 Illinois children in foster care are waiting to be adopted, McConnell said. According to the state, 1,800 children in foster care were adopted in the fiscal year that spanned from July 2013 to June 2014.

Children could be in the state's care, in homes, or in private agencies. The problem with the system as it currently exists, McConnell said, is the lack of a connection between these children and the people who could become their parents.

“I thought 'this is the perfect solution to the most heartbreaking problem,' " McConnell said.

McConnell – a mother of four who adopted three children before foster care adoptions existed – first noticed the gap when she started taking pictures of children for the Heart Gallery, a state-supported project that features portraits of foster children. After years of taking their pictures, a frustration built up in McConnell over the children's fate.

"I knew right away no one was adopting these children and that was bothering me," McConnell said. "When you take a little kid's pictures you spend time with them. To learn that your work isn't effective really, really bothered me."

So in summer 2014, her work on the nonprofit started in earnest. By December, the group officially became a nonprofit. And in April, the group had its first adoption event, which McConnell said ended with four couples starting the process to adopt.

McConnell plans to hold adoption events four times a year. Group members also plan to meet with social service agencies and create their own complete listing of all children available for adoption. McConnell said her ultimate goal to find families for 100 children this year.

Several avenues exist for parents to connect with foster care children who are or soon will be available for adoption. But a necessary step in all of them is becoming a licensed Illinois foster parent. In Osterhues' case, she and her husband, Mark, went into foster parenting in 2002 with the idea that she wanted to adopt. She had looked at adopting abroad, but changed direction when she learned it would cost nearly $50,000.

After fostering an infant that was in and out of her home within two weeks, a boy named Colby arrived. It took about a year until his birth parents' rights had been relinquished, which is required before a child can be adopted. She would go through the process three more times, adopting now 14-year-old Colby's half-brother Kyle, 16, and two others: Emily, 9, and Lamar, 5.

Terminating a parent's rights is a serious feat, said Cheryl McIntire, the statewide adoption administrator for the Department of Children and Family services. The main goal is to reunite the child with their parents, but that's not always possible, she said. Also key to foster adoptions, which are free, is the requirement the child be in the home for at least six months before the adoption.

“We want permanency for the child,” McIntire said. “For people to look at the idea of becoming a foster parent with the idea that they would adopt that child, that's wonderful.”

McConnell's passion isn't solely for building families, it's for improving the chances that children who wind up in foster care will succeed. She said nearly half of girls raised in foster care will be pregnant by age 19, only half of foster care children will graduate from high school and 40 percent will be homeless withing 18 months of aging out of the system.

Putting a child into a loving home, she said, could be a catalyst in the child's life for a better future.

"What I hope is, these children can get families," McConnell said. "Because a family is a lifelong gift, not just until you're 18 or 21."

Correction: Photo captions with an earlier version of this story included an incorrect spelling of the Osterhues family's last name. The Northwest Herald regrets the error.