Ann Marie Scheidler

“I never thought I could design and launch an app,” says Rebecca Asfour, owner of Bird Barre Studio, a boutique fitness studio in Lake Forest. “But I ended up designing and launching two apps in one year!” After navigating the challenges of being a small business owner during 2020 and successfully emerging on the other

When Ashley Lillis was teaching herself how to knit in college, she never imagined that one day she would be sharing patterns she designed with her creative followers from all around the globe. “Of all the things my roommate and I could have been doing when we were in college, we were making trips to

“The children at Allendale, on average, experience 14 different living arrangements before they find their way to the residential program at Allendale,” says Lake Forest’s Cassie Mancuso Carver. “They experience so much trauma and instability, how can someone not be driven to help?” Allendale Association is a nonprofit child welfare agency based in Lake Villa,

Dina Besic almost can’t retell the story of the March day last year when she learned that her 2-year-old son Maxwell had leukemia. “Max is our rainbow baby,” Besic says of her oldest child. “My husband and I had been trying to have a baby for 10 years and of course, during the apocalypse of

Ten years ago, Ben and Elizabeth O’Connor welcomed their first baby into the world—a little boy named Ryan. “I had a pretty uneventful pregnancy, no testing that signaled any issues,” recalls O’Connor. “Our beautiful little boy was born on December 9, 2014. He passed all of his tests at the hospital, and they sent us