In the News
When I was a child, my parents talked to me about the importance of paying bills on time, maintaining good credit. And saving.
Today, too many African-American girls aren't learning about money matters. While I value the important financial lessons my parents taught me, I also recognize their advice was limited, based on their experiences and knowledge.
Like many young African-American girls growing up in families without wealth, we lacked in-depth discussions about financial security, investing and building sustainable, transferrable wealth.
There are no gun shops in Chicago, but the city is inundated with firearms.
Police have seized more than 5,600 illegally-possessed guns in Chicago this year alone, including 60 the weekend of August 3-5, when 66 people were shot and 12 killed between Friday evening and Sunday morning.
Summertime is often a chance to relax and take a day off, but in the small Illinois town of Kankakee, local businesses are charging ahead at full speed thanks in part to the power of the internet.
United States Representative Robin Kelly recently invited Taylor Ausley, a local high school student who won the Congressional Art Competition in Illinois's second district, to come to Washington D.C. and see her winning artwork at the U.S. Capital where it will hang for the next year.
The winning piece titled Chiefs Halo is a mixed-media artwork that combined wood burning and the use of conté, a drawing medium composed of compressed powdered graphite or charcoal mixed with a wax or clay base.
Olivia Shorter, of Matteson, walked the halls of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., and entered the offices of several members of Congress for one-on-one meetings.
Shorter, 7, was there to urge lawmakers to help children, like her, who have sickle cell disease.
"Hello, my name is Olivia," her pitch began, according to her mother, Danielle Shorter. "Thank you for helping children with sickle cell. Here's my card."
At a time when everyone should be working to protect the integrity of our electoral system, Illinois may be an unwitting partner in throwing valid voters off the rolls.
On Tuesday, Gov. Bruce Rauner vetoed a bill that would have pulled Illinois out of an inaccurate multistate voter registration crosscheck system. At a time when Illinois should be beefing up voting security, this takes us in the wrong direction.
Congresswoman Robin Kelly on Monday, July 11, hosted a congressional delegation to Chicago that met with local leaders to address police accountability and aggression towards local law enforcement.
The delegation was part of the Policing Strategies Working Group, a bipartisan group that has held a series of roundtables in Washington, D.C., Detroit, Atlanta, and Houston – to discuss the issues fueling excessive force used by law enforcement and attacks against police officers.
In 2008, South Shore resident Cheryl King found a lump in her right breast.
When she told a health professional at a South Side facility, he dismissed it, saying many African-Americans have lumps in their breasts. In the three months it took to get appointments and tests with other professionals to verify it was cancer, it had grown into a stage 2 tumor.
King, 59, is not alone. Racial disparities in breast cancer diagnosis and survival rates may have more to do with neighborhood than race, according to a new University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign analysis.
A new bill has been introduced to Congress by Representative Robin Kelly, D-Illinois to help reverse America's rising maternal mortality rate. Congresswoman Kelly presented the initiative in early May 2018 to help hundreds of women who die each year as a result of pregnancy.
The new initiative is called the Mothers and Offspring Mortality & Morbidity Awareness (MOMMA) Act.
"Hundreds of American mothers are dying. It's time for Congress to do something about It," says Congresswoman Robin Kelly.
Congresswoman Robin Kelly from Illinois second district recently hosted a panel discussion with Congressman Dan Kildee (MI-05) to discuss the communities in Chicago's South Suburbs, and across the country, who are facing significant financial stress and who are looking for a way the federal government can help. Several government and community leaders from South Suburban Communities were present to give their thoughts on the matter.