First Reading

              ILLINOIS GENERAL ASSEMBLY LEGISLATIVE RESEARCH UNIT
Volume 21, No. 4
Abstracts of reports required to be
filed with General Assembly............3
Inside this Issue
June 2008
Illinois ResourceNet: A Funding Access Initiative
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(The Great Cities Institute at the Uni­versity of Illinois at Chicago—opened in 1995 to study and improve life in Chicago and other major cities—is starting a statewide program called “Illinois ResourceNet: A Funding Ac­cess Initiative.” It is intended to help small localities, and nonprofit organiza­tions, get federal funds. Illinois Re­sourceNet’s Project Director, Richard Kordesh, and Communications and Outreach Coordinator, Irene Tostado, provided the following article on this new program.—Ed.)
Illinois ResourceNet: A Funding Access Initiative is a new statewide capacity building project aimed at help­ing nonprofit organizations and small municipalities to acquire more federal resources. Building on a community development paradigm, Illinois Re­sourceNet strives to strengthen local community networks while also im­proving the grant-seeking capabilities of individual organizations.
Many local organizations find the pursuit of federal funds to be a par­ticularly challenging endeavor. As a partnership between the University of Illinois at Chicago’s (UIC) Great Cities
Grandparent Visits Get Little Help From Courts
Illinois, and five states in the Legislative Research Unit’s 18-state standard survey list, do not allow trial courts to grant visitation to grandparents over objections by fit parents. Illinois courts have held that allowing visitation over such objections infringes on parents’ fundamental rights to make decisions about the upbringing of their children.
Illinois Laws
Subsection 607(a-5)(1) of the Illinois Marriage and Dissolution of Marriage Act (as amended in 2005 and 2007) says that a grandparent, great-grandparent, or sibling can petition for visitation of a minor if “there is an unreasonable denial of visitation by a parent” and any one of the following is true:
(1) The other parent is dead, or has been missing at least 3 months.
(2) Either parent is legally incompetent.
(3) Either parent has been confined to jail or prison for the last 3 months before a petition is filed.
(4) The parents are divorced or “have been legally separated” (the law does not say how recently or for how long); or there is a pending divorce proceeding involving at least one of the parents, or another court proceeding involving custody or visitation of the minor—if in each such case at least one parent does not object to visitation.
(5) The minor was born out of wedlock; the parents are not liv­ing together; and the petitioner is an ancestor of the mother, or of the adjudicated father (or is a sib­ling of the minor).
These statutory grandparent visitation rights end if the child is adopted, unless both of the child’s parents are dead. Subsection 607(a-5)(3) creates a rebuttable presumption that a fit parent’s visitation decisions regarding grandparents are not harmful to the child; a grandparent petitioning for visitation with a mi­nor has the burden of proving that the parent’s decisions are harmful to the minor.
The provisions just described were added by two acts effective in 2005 and 2007. The first act amended sub­section 607(b)(1) to remove the following condi­tions in which a grandparent could petition for visitation with a grandchild:
(1) the parents are not currently cohabiting on a permanent or indefinite basis;
(2) one parent has been absent from the marital abode, at a place or place un­known to the other spouse, for more than 1 month;
(3) one of the parents is deceased;
(4) one of the parents joins the petition with the grandpar­ents; or
(5) a sibling is in state custody.