Obamas donating $2 million to South Side summer jobs program

By Frederick H. Lowe
Contributing Writer

(Special from NorthStarNews Today) – Former President Barack Obama has been criticized within his own party for pocketing a $400,000 check for speaking to some Wall Street big shots.

Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren registered their disapproval of Obama for accepting the big check for a conference organized by the investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald.

But on Wednesday, May 3, Obama did something that might quiet some of the criticism.

The former president and former First Lady Michelle Obama donated $2 million of their own money for a summer jobs program on Chicago’s South Side.

“Michelle and I will personally donate $2 million to our summer jobs programs here in the community so that right away people can get to work and we can start providing opportunity for them,” he said, noting that the center itself will not open for four more years.
“We can’t afford to wait four years to start working together, and so what Michelle and I want to do is start now,” Obama said, citing the violence in Chicago.
The immediate creation of a jobs program is designed to provide young men and women with meaningful employment and to show that the best antidotes to Chicago’s headline-capturing violence are jobs, Obama said.

There are two parts to Obama’s plan: an immediate summer jobs program in Woodlawn, a South Side neighborhood, and a long-term jobs program for older teenagers tied to construction of the Obama Presidential Center in nearby Jackson Park, also on the South Side.

“We’ll be working with the city, we’ll be working with the county, we’ll be working with businesses because part of what we want to do is reach young people who might be at risk if they don’t have something to do during the summers,” he added. “But part of what we also want to do is reach older youth who may be prepared for apprenticeships because one of the things that the project is going to do is generate jobs. We want to make sure that some of those young people can get trained so people don’t say, ‘Why didn’t you hire anyone from the neighborhood?’”

Obama announced the jobs program during the unveiling of a model for his $500 million, 200,000 square-foot Presidential Center, which is scheduled to open in 2021.

Ahead of the event, Michelle Obama tweeted what some perceive as a subtle dig at the Trump administration.

“Excited by the potential of the Obama Pres. Center, Barack & I will continue to champion the issues close to our hearts, including girls ed,” she wrote recently.

A Trump administration memo obtained by CNN earlier this week calls for the ending of “Let Girls Learn,” one of her signature girls education initiatives. Hours after CNN reported on the internal document advising administration employees that the education initiative would not be maintained, the White House said the program had not changed.

This article originally published in the May 8, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.