Even before the current recession set in, a growing number of people across Illinois were struggling to make ends meet. For years, housing prices have outpaced incomes. Rising childcare, health services, and utility expenses have eaten into wages too, tipping more people into poverty, full-time workers included.

Last summer, the Illinois legislature adopted an ambitious goal to cut the state’s extreme poverty rate in half by 2015. Late last week, the panel charged with devising the state’s plan—dubbed the Commission on the Elimination of Poverty—met at the first Poverty Summit to begin drafting their proposal. Given recent economic events, there’s new urgency for participants to craft what many hope will be a landmark poverty reduction plan.

Based on the Chicago Community Trust’s latest vital signs report, the economic crisis is taking a devastating toll on Illinoisans; month after month, more residents are pushed to the brink of poverty:

-Mass layoff claims grew across Illinois by 2,901 to 7,842 between October and November;

-Monthly Chicago-area homeless prevention inquiries increased in October by 2,026, to 6,195, compared with the beginning of 2008;

-115,335 more families were served at Chicago-area food pantries in October than the first month of the year.

The grim statistics go on and on. But the prospect of leveraging money from a forthcoming economic stimulus plan, which President-elect Barack Obama is expected to unveil once he takes office, offers the opportunity to change course, Heartland Alliance policy director Doug Schenkelberg tells us.

For starters, rebuilding infrastructure doesn’t have to be exclusive to roads and bridges. Desperately needed affordable housing, for example, could create jobs and meet the growing demand for homes.

“We have to think, how do we as a state most effectively use those dollars to lift people out of poverty,” Schenkelberg tells us. “It’s going to be an opportunity for us to move on things we haven’t been able to do for years.”