By Todd Wineburner with Claudia Johnson

A report out today (Wednesday, 1-16) says one third of Illinoisans are living at or near the poverty level. The study comes from the Heartland Alliance for Human Needs through their Social Impact Research Center, and is the product of statistics gathered from a variety of sources and previous studies. Jennifer Clary is a research associate for the center who explains that calculating poverty levels is a formula that considers a family’s size and income compared with established standards of poverty. A family of four in Illinois with income of less than 23,000 dollars is below the poverty level. Almost 2 million Illinoisans live in poverty and almost half of those are significantly below the poverty line. IMPACT says 39 out of 102 Illinois counties are under either poverty watches or poverty warnings.