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Displaying 1 through 13 of 137
Thursday, June 23, 2016
Cook County, Illinois, which includes Chicago, struggles with poverty, unemployment and homelessness — but a new program inspired by social enterprise aims to help.
Cook County is taking a page out of the social enterprise playbook. The county’s new Commission on Social innovation is chartered to incubate actionable policy recommendation that...
Thursday, May 19, 2016
Photo by Eric Young Smith Yvonne Cherry works for Cleanslate, a social enterprise run by the Cara program.
Too many residents of Cook County are living on the outskirts of hope. And the challenges that poverty brings with it are tougher than ever.
Yet the social sector that helps our poorest residents is under enormous stress. Nonprofits can no longer...
Tuesday, January 5, 2016
Illinois’ Democratic lawmakers find Republican Governor Bruce Rauner‘s “turnaround agenda” to jumpstart the state’s economic competitiveness and spur job creation politically toxic. Neither side is in any rush to compromise on legislative term limits, workers’ compensation reform, damage award caps in civil lawsuits or...
Tuesday, October 27, 2015
Photo by Thinkstock
The public trust is hard to gain but easy to lose. Take the case of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Near-daily revelations about Clinton's use of her personal email account and secret email server while conducting government business have dogged the Democratic front-runner's presidential campaign. Her alleged evasion of...
Tuesday, September 1, 2015
Photo by Thinkstock
During this summer of Trump, the nation's undocumented immigrants are under attack. All 11 million of them are unrealistically threatened with mass deportation. And the U.S. House has passed a measure that would strip federal law enforcement grants from “sanctuary cities” that shield undocumented immigrants from...
Wednesday, July 8, 2015
Photo by Pictures of Money via Flickr
Putting aside their existential struggle over policy and power, Illinois' legislators have found common ground in supporting the state's entrepreneurial community. Come January, with Gov. Bruce Rauner's widely assumed approval, Illinois will boast an intrastate crowdfunding law that is more friendly to small business...
Monday, May 18, 2015
ginza_line via Flickr
Many cities in Illinois, overwhelmed by pension debt and faced with unprecedented cuts in state aid, soon might be lobbying the General Assembly to amend the Illinois Municipal Code to allow local governments to go bankrupt, a remedy Gov. Bruce Rauner supports. If a pending bill of Rep. Ron Sandack, R-Downers Grove, becomes law,...
Tuesday, March 3, 2015
kristin_a via Flickr
Nearly 80 percent of Chicago's voters supported a citywide advisory referendum on the Feb. 24 ballot that would reduce the influence of special-interest money in city–and state–elections by financing campaigns using small contributions from individuals and a limited amount of public money.
It's been widely reported that...
Thursday, January 22, 2015
Climate change, mostly the result of carbon pollution, threatens the health of the nation's—and Chicago's—residents. Ground-level ozone, particle pollution, pollen concentrations, infectious diseases, asthma and other respiratory illnesses, heavy rainfall and flooding, and extreme-heat events all are on the rise.
The city's children, elderly,...
Wednesday, November 19, 2014
The decision by Republican leaders in the U.S. House to reauthorize the federal Export-Import Bank's charter only until June, leaving the institution in limbo until another vote is taken, spells big trouble for Illinois exporters, large and small.
Since 1934 the bank has created and sustained U.S. jobs and reduced trade deficits by financing and insuring...
Tuesday, September 30, 2014
Pete Zarria/Flickr
Illinois' 1848 Constitution gave voters in each county the right to organize townships for the “management of the fiscal concerns of the county.” The framers' decision for our then-30-year-old, largely agrarian state was a no-brainer: As the most local of local governments, townships would be directly accountable to...
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
Navy Pier, Chicago's No. 1 tourist attraction, has a storied history. Over its 100-year life, it's been a commercial shipping destination, a Navy training center, a University of Illinois campus, a convention site and, most recently, a lakefront entertainment complex. But today not all of Navy Pier's stories are being told.
Three years ago, the...
Thursday, June 19, 2014
When Illinois' county-based prosecutors, charged with the twin responsibilities of protecting the public and defending the rights of victims, join forces to push back against government transparency, someone needs to cry foul and a higher authority needs to set them straight.
That's exactly what happened last month in the case of Nelson v. Kendall County,...
Displaying 1 through 13 of 137
