The CivicLab is proud to release the first ever all-Illinois TIF Illumination! Funded by a grant from the MuckRock Foundation, this project reviewed 1,454 TIF districts across 535 municipalities! Get the headlines and the data at https://tifreports.com/illinois-illumination. Read the news about the grant award.
The CivicLab has been awarded a $10,000 grant from the Muckrock Foundation to investigate and expose ALL the 1,454 TIFs of Illinois from 2020! Details here.
Help publish “Nobody Sent Us” How We Derailed Chicago’s Bid for the 2016 Summer Olympics – the story of the No Games Chicago campaign from 2009. Donate to help market the book.
Proud to have created the YPF for Pegasus in 1986. Tens of thousands of teens have written plays, hundreds of finalists, and dozens of winners. https://pegasustheatrechicago.org
Gazette Chicago reporter attended our October 4, 2021 deep dive on the TIFs of Chicago. This is the first time a Chicago-based reporter has attended on reported on one of our public TIF meetings in six years! Read the report here…
Tom was interviewed on WVON on September 20, 2021 covering the state of Chicago’s civic finances in the wake of Mayor Lightfoot’s 2022 Budget Address. In this wide-ranging thirty minute interview we cover a lot of ground for justice and equity in Chicago!
Tom on WGN 9-18-21
Tom was interviewed by “Outside the Loop” host Mike Stephen on September 18, 2021. We went over how TIFs work and reviewed the headlines for Chicago’s 2020 TIF record-breaking TIF activities. Tom explains how the Massachusetts Institute of Technology agrees with the CivicLab that TIFs are racist.
We are proud to announce that the CivicLab’s TIF Illumination Project was a finalist for the MIT Solve Global Challenge “Antiracist Technology in the U.S.”! Seven winners were chosen from the 15 finalists from this challenge. There are four other global challenges and over 1,800 solutions were submitted from 29 countries! The 35 winners across all five challenges shared a $2 million prize pool! Our solution-> http://tinyurl.com/Vote-4-CL-Tech-Challenge Watch the pitch below:
This has been an incredible few weeks! On April 23, 2021 the Chicago Tribune ran the most complete explanation of the TIF Illumination Project since we started the work in 2013! Thanks to the citizen organizers of Save Our Southland SOS!
On May 10, 2021 I was interviewed on WBEZ’s “Reset” program by Sasha-Ann Simon. The 16 minute segment was part of their series “Re-Imagine Chicago.”
My chapter “Chicago Is Not Broke – Moving from Scarcity to Abundance” appears in Prof. Dick Simpson’s newly released “Twenty-First Century Chicago” from Cognella Press. Guess who has the next chapter in the book? Mayor Lori Lightfoot. Pretty cool, no?
