Links & Navigation
 Search Using
Our Work
The Issues
United Way of Metropolitan Chicago is working to address the five greatest challenges facing people in our region.
Nearly one out of every six Illinois residents under the age of 65 is uninsured, with the majority (about 1.3 million) living in the Chicagoland area. 80% of them are from working families.
About 18,000 unnecessary deaths occur each year because of lack of health insurance, making it the 6th leading cause of death among people ages 25-64.
As many as 1/2 of Chicago inner city adolescents demonstrate signs and symptoms of depression. In 2003, 12.1% of Chicago high school students (that's more than one in ten) attempted suicide—the highest percentage of attempted suicides in 18 major cities.
Illinois is particularly unprepared to address mental health needs, ranking 47th among 50 states in funding programs that serve the mentally ill.
About 1/3 of Illinois first graders are not ready to learn when they start school.
Nearly two-thirds of all jobs in the metropolitan area require workers to have some post-secondary education. By 2013 more than 80% of the 23 million new jobs will require some post-secondary education. Yet, in Chicago, 46% of youth do not even complete high school.
Only about 9% of Chicago 8th graders are proficient in science, tying for the third-lowest rate among the big cities.
In 2002, 71% of Chicago's public high school graduates, and 41% of Illinois' public high school graduates, were considered minimally or not academically ready for college.
The poverty rate in Illinois is 11.9%, the highest in the Midwest.
Since 2000, Illinois has lost more than 150,000 manufacturing jobs—an average of more than 100 a day—and they have been replaced with jobs paying at least 20% less. From 1990 to 2005 average pay plummeted 29.2%.
Today more than 28 million people, about a quarter of the workforce between the ages of 18 and 64, earn less than $9.04 an hour, which translates into a full-time salary of $18,800 a year—the income that marks the federal poverty line for a family of four.
In Illinois, a two parent family with both parents working full time and earning minimum wage ($21,424) would need to spend 25% of their income on child care—for just one child.
Between 2000 and 2005, Chicago's median monthly housing cost rose 22%, compared to just 5% nationally.
A worker needs to make at least $17.33/hour to afford a 2-bedroom apartment in our region at the fair-market price of $901 per month. Minimum wage in Illinois is just $7.50/hour (as of July 1st, 2007).
In Chicago, nearly 50% of renters must spend more than one-third of their incomes on housing. Homeowners in the six-county area who spend more than 35% of their household income on housing costs jumped from 17% in 2000 to 28% in 2005.
In October 1999, the Chicago Housing Authority had 38,776 apartments serving 60,000 occupants. By June 2006 CHA had just 27,372 apartments serving just 31,602 people.
Every year, nearly 166,000 people in our region experience homelessness. On any given night, as many as 15,000 people are homeless, in Chicago alone.
Requests for food assistance from food pantries soared 18% in 2006.
1 in 4 women will become a victim of domestic violence at some point in her life.
In 2003, 56% of the women in Chicago's homeless shelters were victims of domestic violence and 22% claimed that domestic violence was the immediate cause of their homelessness.
|
