Prairie State Wire

The They Deserve More campaign is seeking full funding for services for the mentally disabled.

They Deserve More is a statewide collaboration of approximately 90 community-based organizations, trade and advocacy groups, and disabled people's friends and relatives. The group was formed in 2017 to ensure that Illinois fulfills its responsibility to assist people with intellectual and developmental impairments.

“A mandated wage pass-through is not the answer – it actually hurts providers’ ability to reward and retain staff in a variety of ways, things like bonuses, spot increases, health and retirement plan improvements, and more," according to a They Deserve More press release. "Our agencies have provided these critically needed services for decades – we know what it takes to ensure the stability of the community provider system."

The coalition of providers is behind the They Deserve More campaign that is speaking out on the budgetary decisions affecting providers of care of the mental disabled.

The providers have come out against public sector union AFSCME-backed HB4647, which would require any finding to go directly to employees of providers, bypassing provider executive decision-making.

They Deserve More opposed the bill backed by AFSCME, noting it would seek to limit the way the funding is spent by earmarking it only for wages.

The coalition is instead backing two bills – HB4832 and SB4063 – aimed at providing a full funding of services for the mentally disabled per the consent decree but not limit how providers can use those funds.

The bills would appropriate more than $246 million from the General Revenue Fund to the Department of Human Services, according to the Guidehouse Rate Study.

Kim Zoeller CEO of the Lisle-based Ray Graham Association said the care providers need more freedom on how to spend the monies being provided by the General Assembly.

“There's nothing tied to our contracts that say that the state needs to increase our rates so that we can pay minimum wage or above," Zoeller told Prairie State Wire. "I mean, these jobs have to be above minimum wage. We're talking about people's lives, you know that we have to be better funded. But what has been happening is that we get funding and then we are told exactly how we must spend that money."

The Guidehouse Rate Study is a 2019 recommendation by a third-party observer hired to provide a pathway forward for the state to properly provide funding to the network of programs serving the intellectually disabled across the state.

The study found such programs were underfunded by $246.8 million in fiscal year 2023 alone.

The study was commissioned after a court in 2018 found the state was not in compliance with a consent decree on how to fund the programming. The initial consent decree was issued in 2011 and the state is still out of compliance 11 years later.

According to the Guidehouse study, over 10,000 individuals live in such 24-hour programs across the state. Another 20,000 take advantage of individual day programs. Another 5,000 are served by other state funded programming.  

The They Deserve More campaign diverted from the asks of the AFSCME union, which represents around 10% of the providers’ employees.