State budget

The State Journal-Register reported October 14 that this year's state budget is $900 million higher than expected.

As AIDSConnect pointed out last week, next year's state budget is projected to reach nearly $12 billion.

What can we do? Join the Responsible Budget Coalition!

The Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) recently released a memo outlining an increase in the number of people enrolled in the AIDS Drug Assistance Program (ADAP), which provides no-cost medications to low-income people living with HIV.  The utilization increase "forced [IDPH] to reduce or eliminate grant awards to HIV/AIDS grantees funded in FY 09.”&

Many HIV advocates jumped for joy on July 30 when Illinois Governor Pat Quinn announced that he had restored most of the state’s HIV budget cuts.  And when I say most, I mean 97.4 percent!  In a year when lawmakers entertained budget cuts as deep as 50 percent, this was welcome news.  But budget cuts are coming, and YOU need to take action to make sure cuts are f

by Samuel Worley

   As indicators point to the beginning of the end of the economic recession, local agencies that offer social services to the LGBT community continue to struggle with funding.  
   Although the state of the national economy has dominated headlines over the past year, many in the Chicago nonprofit community say that constant struggle over funding and budgetary issues is nothing new.  Most have experiened a slowdown in private fundraising and donations from foundations since the beginning of the recession - but political intransigence on the part of the crisis-laden state government did not begin with the recession, and in some important ways occurs quite independently of it.
   What's different from the seemingly routine state government crises of the years past, said John Peller, Director of Government Relations for the AIDS Foundation of Chicago (AFC), is the size of read full story...