This morning, for no particular reason other than I'm moving to Minnesota in 8 weeks, I've been playing around with the "state of the states" chart creator for spending on Intellectual and Developmental Disability. I've loved my time in Chicagoland. It's packed with amazing advocates and leaders, but they are fighting against some pretty serious structural headwinds when it comes to disability rights and services.
Here's some data:
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| Chart showing MN spends $6.95 per $1000 of personal income, IL spends $2.72 |
MN places 98% of its community funding in 6 or fewer person homes. Illinois, just 58.1
United Cerebral Palsy does an annual (I think) report on the best states for inclusion. The latest has a lot of details which I'll explore later. I actually don't think all their metrics are optimal (Arizona is ranked #1, and I'm skeptical for various reasons). But they do provide some useful overviews. For example, MN is ranked 12, the ranking low only because of a waiting list. It needs to grow by 20% to meet need.
Illinois is ranked 47. The entry reads:
Illinois has 7 large state facilities housing 1761 Americans at a cost of $155855 per person per year.Minnesota will surely have its own problems for me to rage against. I'm sad to leave my allies and friends and colleagues and students behind. But I do like these numbers.
Illinois participates in the National Core Indicators, the premier quality assurance program, and reported their 2015 NCI survey data.
Illinois has a waiting list that would require the program to grow by 101% on average to accommodate the need
