Nonprofit Leaders to Attend Obama Economic-Competitiveness Conference

Several nonprofit and philanthropic leaders are among a dozen people who have been invited to attend a conference on economic competitiveness that Sen. Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, is holding on Thursday in Pittsburgh.

Participants in the “American Competitiveness Summit” will discuss ways the country’s work force can remain competitive in a 21st-century global economy, according to a statement by the Obama campaign.

They will include Lael Brainard, vice president of the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington; Eli Broad, founder of the Broad Foundations, in Los Angeles; Geoffrey Canada, chief executive of the Harlem Children’s Zone, a charity that serves poor children in New York; Steve Case, chairman of the Case Foundation, in Washington; Susan Hockfield, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Harold Varmus, president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, in New York.

They will join business, labor, and other leaders at the conference.

“Obama has called for a strategy that creates the jobs and opportunity of the future built upon an improved education system, investments in energy, green jobs, innovation and infrastructure, and a commitment to fiscal responsibility and fair trade,” the Obama campaign statement said.

Mr. Broad said in a statement that he would discuss ways to improve the country’s public schools and other education issues.

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