Obama Foundation Poised to Be a Powerful Force in Racial Justice Movement

The Obama Foundation is positioning itself to be a major force in the fight for racial justice after taking a break from fundraising during the early months of the pandemic to avoid siphoning off support from organizations providing essentials like food, medical support, and cash assistance to people in need.

The shift was already underway as President Obama took virtual center stage Wednesday at the Democratic National Convention to use his huge sway among a generation of voters to build support for Joe Biden.

After the police killing of George Floyd and the nationwide calls to end systemic racism increased in volume this summer, the foundation decided to re-engage donors.

“We were receiving thousands of unsolicited online donations and phone calls from people saying that the Obama Foundation has the potential to be at the forefront of the work that needs to be done,” says David Simas, the foundation’s chief executive. He adds, “We want to be part of this.”

Since its founding in 2014, the Chicago-based foundation has focused on building the Obama presidential library and running a slate of domestic and international programs to help people develop leadership skills. The foundation runs My Brother’s Keeper, a program inspired by an Obama White House effort, spun off as a separate entity, and then brought back within the foundation in 2017.

The foundation also runs the Girls Opportunity Alliance, a program to help adolescent girls and the grass-roots leaders who work to educate them; leadership-development programs focused on Africa and Asia; and a fellowship program. The foundation also runs a program specifically tailored for community leaders, but that effort was put on hold because of the pandemic.

Star Power

Simas says the foundation can play a valuable role because Barack and Michelle Obama’s star power hasn’t dimmed four years after leaving the White House. Following the George Floyd killing, the My Brother’s Keeper Alliance hosted a series of online meetings with President Obama and instructional webinars that followed under the rubric “Anguish and Action,” designed to spur policy change and raise money for civil-rights organizations.

In one online meeting, Obama was joined by former Attorney General Eric Holder, Color of Change founder Rashad Robinson, and other leaders. The group exhorted the nation’s mayors to take a different approach to policing.

Following the event, 200 mayors, representing 50 million constituents, signed a pledge to include input from residents in reviews of police use-of-force rules, report the findings publicly, and make changes to their policies. The 2.7 million viewers of the video were asked to visit the Obama Foundation website, where they could take such actions as donating to the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor memorial funds or to a variety of bail funds nationwide.

Another online event featured Rep. John Lewis, in what was one of the civil-rights hero’s last public events before his death on July 17, and Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative. The leaders discussed the impact of racism on mental health and exhorted viewers to visit the Obama Foundation’s website. There, they could take a number of actions, including donating to the Loveland Foundation’s therapy fund, which supports therapy for Black women and girls, and the support groups for transgender people run by the Brave Space Alliance.

Simas says the foundation has not tracked how many donations the events inspired. But the messages they conveyed reached a wide audience. The foundation says it has an email list of 2.6 million people, 1.1 million Facebook followers, and about 1.6 million followers on Instagram.

Failing to Deliver?

The resumption of fundraising comes as companies, foundations, and individual donors pour billions of dollars into a variety of efforts to fight racism. Simas declines to predict how the pause in fundraising, and the surge in donor interest that followed, might affect totals for the year. Last year, contributions to the foundation fell 14 percent, to $141 million.

Following the creation of the foundation, Shawn Dove, founder of the Campaign for Black Male Achievement, envisioned the Obama Foundation as a fundraising juggernaut that could help smaller groups across the nation. After the killing of Michael Brown and the Ferguson uprising, his organization and other groups focused on nurturing the leadership qualities of Black boys and girls saw an uptick in interest from donors. While the Obama Foundation was a new entrant, Dove and others looked to it as a centerpiece of the effort.

The election of 2016 shifted donor focus away from developing Black men and boys as leaders, Dove says, and the Obama Foundation failed to deliver on expectations.

“There were folks on the ground who were waiting to see a trickle-down effect of resources who did not see it,” he says.

The Campaign for Black Male Achievement, spun off in 2015 from the Open Society Foundations as a free-standing nonprofit, will close its doors by the end of the year. Although Black-led organizations have received an avalanche of support over the past three months, Dove worries that the interest won’t be sustained and they will have to close down for lack of funds, just like his group.

By focusing on leadership development, rather than directly supporting grass-roots groups, the foundation has inoculated itself from risk, according to some observers. Often, foundation and nonprofit boards want to distance themselves from the message of community groups that may promote shaking up the status quo, says Nat Chioke Williams, chief executive of the Hill-Snowdon Foundation.

But Williams said the foundation’s support of leadership development was a crucial part of the broader effort to support groups pushing for social change.

“A lot of times people think about policy but sometimes forget people within it,” he says. “Folks are really struggling. There’s a lot of trauma and a lot of stress that folks are under. And it’s those same leaders that we’re expecting to keep fighting,” he says.

What the foundation lacks, he says, is an explicit commitment to actual community organizing. Leadership, he says, has its limits and depends on a healthy, well-funded network of community organizations to push for social change.

However, Williams is moderate in his disappointment. He recalls in 2008 that when Obama was elected, many grass-roots leaders looked at Obama’s past as an organizer in Chicago’s South Side and thought they had one of their own — a community organizer president — as an ally in the White House.

The hope that Obama’s presidency and now his foundation work live up to those expectations is probably unwarranted, Williams says. The nonprofit is an extension of Barack and Michelle Obama’s public service and will help shape their political legacy. Opponents of the couple, whether they are Chicago organizers who object to the lack of community involvement in the planning of his presidential center , or people on the right who see the Obamas as political enemies, are quick to pounce on the work of the couple’s philanthropy, Williams says.

“I wouldn’t want to lead that foundation,” he says. “Just step out of line and it becomes national international news and it reflects immediately on the president and the first lady. They walk a very narrow line.”

Sticking to Leadership Development

That’s fine with Simas. Barack and Michelle Obama have the latitude to push on particular issues, he says. But the foundation remains focused on leadership development.

“That’s our North Star, and we won’t deviate from it,” he says.

Simas suggests that there is a consensus on what policies might address critical issues but a lack of “Obama-style” leaders to carry those policies out.

And what is an “Obama-style leader”?

An Obama leader, Simas says, is “hopeful, resilient, accountable, and inclusive.”

He adds: “Leadership isn’t necessarily going into a community and telling people what you think they need. Leadership is going into that community first and listening deeply to what they tell you that they need and then helping them see their own agency in power so that they are part of the solution.”