From Chicago to Cairo, the lack of a state budget has affected people and programs throughout Illinois.
Melissa Heil, a PhD student at the University of Illinois in Urbana, is mapping that impact through an online project called the Illinois Atlas of Austerity.
Heil says the atlas stemmed out of her own desire to wrap her head around the consequences of the state’s fiscal crisis. “It’s difficult when you have a large problem like this, something that impacts a lot of organizations and a lot of people in a lot of different ways. So that's kind of where the idea of putting together this website came from — my personal quest to better understand what the budget impasse was doing,” she says.
You can check out Heil’s Illinois Atlas of Austerity here.