Welcome to the new Civic Federation website!

Welcome to the newly redesigned website for the Civic Federation and our Institute for Illinois’ Fiscal Sustainability. We’ve overhauled civicfed.org to to make it easier for you to find information about our research and stay updated on everything happening here at the Federation and IIFS.

The new website is designed with the goal of increasing the accessibility of our research with resources such as an updated library that allows visitors to search through Federation and IIFS research and commentary quickly and easily, as well as expanded RSS feeds and blogs.

Our new blogs, written by Federation staff, will focus on research, events in the news, and other topics on government finance. During the next few months, the Civic Federation and IIFS will release multimedia materials, including downloadable audio and video podcasts, newsletters, and slideshows.

Also new to civicfed.org is the “Issues” page that spotlights the many research interests of the Civic Federation and our Institute for Illinois’ Fiscal Sustainability. Interested in property taxes or the Illinois State Budget? Click the “Issues” tab on the Federation or IIFS sites to see the most recent research on those topics, including relevant blog posts, quick facts, and multimedia.

In the Library, visitors can now search by the date reports were published or by government, type of publication, and government fiscal year. With hundreds of research documents already available on the site and more added daily, the Federation and IIFS are committed to providing citizens, public officials, and the media with critical information about government in Illinois.

As we grow and enable more website features, we welcome your questions and feedback. Click here to email the Civic Federation.

Looking for something from our archives?

The Civic Federation has a large library of research that is not yet available online. Please feel free to contact us via e-mail with any document requests. Additionally, the Lincoln Park campus of DePaul University maintains an archive of Federation material goes back to the Federation’s origins 115 years ago, as does the University of Illinois at Chicago, whose collection spans 1918 to 1960.

Using RSS Feeds

Keep up with the latest developments at the Civic Federation with our RSS newsfeed.

RSS is a free service we provide to notify our readers about new publications, news clips, and events in near real-time.

Subscribe Now from the RSS Feeds menu to the left.

What is RSS?

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an easy way for you to receive an automatic notification when new publications appear on the Civic Federation’s website. The updates include a description of the new publication and a link to the text of the report.

How to use an RSS feed

To begin using RSS you need an RSS reader, which allows you to display and subscribe to RSS feeds. Many RSS readers can be found through any search engine and quickly downloaded to your computer. Additionally, some internet browsers have news reader capability built in. Once downloaded, an RSS reader will scan websites of your choosing, such as civicfed.org, and automatically download new information posted to those sites.

Google Reader is a simple web-based program that will allow you to aggregate all of your feeds in one location. Additionally, there are many other RSS readers available for all operating systems. Please click this link to see a list of these programs.

Once you have chosen and downloaded your reader, select any of the Civic Federation’s feeds form the left sidebar menu and follow your reader’s instructions to subscribe. Most readers simply require you to either copy and paste or drag and drop the feed’s Web address (URL) into the reader.

If you have questions or comments about RSS or the Civic Federation’s feed, please email us at civicfed@civicfed.org.