CHICAGO — President Barack Obama’s post-presidential center will return full circle to his community organizing days, making an outreach program to help the historically underprivileged South Side a focus. Obama is expected to pick a community engagement director to lead the effort before leaving the White House.
The search is already underway.
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Details of the Obama Foundation’s mission and organization were shared with POLITICO in an exclusive interview with Marty Nesbitt, Obama’s best friend and the chairman of the foundation. Nesbitt said the planning includes a concerted effort to learn from the experiences of past presidents, including avoiding the financial tangles stemming from Bill Clinton’s decision to separate his presidential library in Little Rock and his family foundation in New York.
As much as the Obama team admires the work of the Clinton Foundation, Nesbitt said, “his [Clinton’s] physical presence is separate from his library. We will be all in one place. Everything that the president does will be from one central entity.”
When Obama leaves office in January 2017 at age 55, he will begin what could become the longest post-presidency in U.S. history. He is unlikely to be drawn back into politics, as Clinton was through his wife, already a senator and prospective presidential candidate by the time he left office.
Nesbitt sketched out a vision of an actively changing agenda that’ll keep Obama moving around the country and the world.
“I don’t see this being one thing forever,” Nesbitt said.
Nesbitt said that in contrast to other former presidents, Obama’s Chicago-based library will be an all-in-one institution — a presidential library, museum, archive, foundation and center — and it will serve as the primary platform for both Barack and Michelle Obama, who has ruled out any future in politics.
Fundraising isn’t expected to begin in earnest until after Obama’s left office, limiting the leverage and access he can use to woo donors, potentially putting him far behind on fundraising for a project that’s yet to land on a final price tag.
The center will also incorporate an academic component, potentially through partnered professors either at the University of Chicago a few blocks away, or with Obama’s alma mater Columbia University, the University of Illinois at Chicago and another satellite location still very much under discussion in Hawaii.
“We want to be able to have that academic perspective, to add to the social perspective,” Nesbitt said.
Obama’s mentoring program for black youth, My Brother’s Keeper, and the scaled-down version of his grass-roots campaign network, Organizing for Action, are both expected to become part of the institution as well.
“I know, just from our conversations, that in whatever idle time he has, he’s been thinking through what comes next,” said Obama’s former adviser, David Axelrod, saying those conversations date back years.
Via: Politico
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