Barrington Brew Fest

A Festival With a Purpose

Every ticket sold for the Barrington Brew Fest does more than buy a tasting glass. Since the festival's early years, the money raised has gone to Let It Be Us, an Illinois nonprofit founded in 2014 with a single, stubbornly practical goal: make sure that children in foster care in this state find permanent, loving families — and find them faster. The Brew Fest is the organization's biggest public fundraiser of the year, and the reason so many local breweries, restaurants, and volunteers keep saying yes is that they can see exactly where the proceeds go.

Illinois has thousands of children in foster care at any given moment, and a meaningful share of them are legally free for adoption but waiting — sometimes for years — because no family has stepped forward for them. Let It Be Us exists to close that gap. Rather than working case by case, the organization builds the recruitment systems, tools, and public campaigns that connect waiting children with adults who are ready to become foster or adoptive parents. It is patient, behind-the-scenes work, and it is the kind of work that a summer afternoon of beer tasting can genuinely help fund.

How Let It Be Us Reaches Families

The organization runs several interconnected programs, each aimed at a different point in the journey from "a child needs a home" to "a child is home."

The Heart Gallery of Illinois. Susan McConnell, who founded Let It Be Us and leads it as executive director, was part of the team that established the Heart Gallery of Illinois — the statewide photo listing of children awaiting adoption. A portrait and a short profile change the odds dramatically for a child who might otherwise never be seen by a prospective parent. Let It Be Us has since designed the companion Illinois Waiting Children's Gallery, which highlights children who need foster placements as well as adoptive ones.

Open Home Navigator. This is the organization's placement platform, built to move children in emergent need — and children who are considered especially hard to place — directly into safe foster and adoptive homes instead of a shelter or an office. It gives caseworkers a live view of which families have an open bed, an open heart, and the right capacity for a particular child.

Foster and Adoptive Parent Recruitment. Year in and year out, the Let It Be Us team recruits hundreds of potential foster and adoptive parents across Illinois through outreach, community events, and digital campaigns. Recruitment is the bottleneck in child welfare; without families, nothing else in the system can work.

The People Behind the Work

Let It Be Us is run by a small staff with deep experience in Illinois child welfare — in recruitment, matching, and placement. Dr. Susan A. McConnell (DSW, MBA) founded the organization in 2014 and holds a doctorate in social work from the University of Southern California, where her research focused on permanency, along with an MBA from DePaul University. In 2017 she was appointed by the director of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services to chair the Permanency Committee of the Illinois Statewide Foster Care Advisory Council. She is also an adoptive parent with three decades of experience in open adoption, which shapes how the organization talks about family — without sentimentality, and with a lot of honesty.

Bryana Hopkins (MPPA) serves as Director of Operations and Finance. A Northwestern University graduate with a master's in public policy and administration and a certificate in nonprofit leadership, she is the person who makes sure the numbers behind the mission hold up, using data to tell the story of the children and families the organization serves. Kate Soldan leads communications, administration, and technology, shaping how the organization reaches prospective parents — work that has helped bring foster care and adoption stories into the mainstream conversation rather than leaving them in a policy footnote.

Why Brew Fest Guests Should Care

You do not have to be in the market to foster or adopt to be part of this. The Brew Fest is designed so that anyone of legal drinking age can spend a pleasant summer afternoon sampling beers from dozens of Midwestern breweries and, in doing so, put money directly into recruitment and placement work for kids in Illinois. Some guests come back year after year and eventually become volunteers; some go further and start the licensing process to become foster parents themselves. Both are welcome outcomes.

If you are curious about what fostering or adopting in Illinois actually involves — the classes, the home study, the licensing timeline, the supports available — the festival is a low-pressure place to start asking questions. Committee members and Let It Be Us staff are on site during the event, and the organization's own website lays out every program in detail. When you raise a glass in Barrington this July, you are raising it for a child who is still waiting for a family. That is a pretty good reason to buy a ticket.