The Obama Foundation is looking for 100 people willing to work for free at its $850 million presidential center in Chicago, even as CEO Valerie Jarrett pulls in $740,000 a year and the organization's total salary and benefits bill has ballooned to $43.7 million.
Fox News reported that the foundation launched a recruitment drive for 75 to 100 unpaid "ambassadors" to complement about 300 full- and part-time employees when the Obama Presidential Center opens on Juneteenth. The salary range for those paid workers has not been disclosed.
The volunteer pitch leans hard on Barack Obama's biography. A foundation press release framed the ask in familiar terms:
"Volunteerism has been central to President Obama's vision of civic life since his earliest days as a community organizer on Chicago's South Side."
Community organizing, it turns out, pays a lot better when you're the one running the foundation instead of knocking on doors.
Federal filings tell a story that the volunteer recruitment page presumably does not. Jarrett, one of the Obamas' closest advisors and a former top Obama aide, became CEO in 2021. She has made $740,000 in each of the last three years on record: 2022, 2023, and 2024.
She is not alone at the top of the pay scale. David Simas, a former White House political director who led the organization from 2017 to 2020, made more than $600,000 annually during his tenure.
Adewale Adeyemo, who later became Biden's deputy Treasury secretary, made roughly $540,000 during his time at the foundation. Several other senior leaders with Obama administration ties earned between roughly $300,000 and $400,000 annually.
The foundation's total compensation footprint has grown dramatically. In 2018, total salaries and benefits stood at $18.5 million. By 2024, that figure had swelled to $43.7 million, with staffing expanded to 337 employees and annual revenue reaching nearly $210 million.
None of this is illegal. But the optics of a quarter-billion-dollar-a-year nonprofit, built around the legacy of a president who made his name championing working people, asking locals to donate their labor while executives draw three-quarters of a million dollars deserves more than a shrug.
This is the Obama ecosystem in miniature. The language is always about community. The structure is always about the people at the top. The press release invokes "civic life" and the South Side. The filings show a C-suite that would make a mid-cap CEO blush.
Jarrett described the center's ambitions in expansive terms:
"A place where the world meets the best of the city of Chicago, and our volunteers will help bring that vision to life every day."
The world meets Chicago, and the volunteers make it happen. The executives cash the checks.
This is a foundation that has positioned itself as an economic engine for Chicago's South Side. A Deloitte Consulting assessment projected $3.1 billion in economic activity over 10 years and cited 5,000 construction jobs tied to the 19.3-acre campus in Jackson Park.
The foundation has also touted that more than 50% of construction contracts went to diverse firms, that 33% of the construction workforce came from South and West Side communities, and that 798 residents enrolled in construction pre-apprenticeship programs.
Those are real numbers, and real people benefited from the construction phase. But construction jobs end. The building opens. And the permanent ask from the foundation is: come work for nothing.
There is nothing wrong with volunteer programs at museums, libraries, or cultural institutions. People volunteer at the Smithsonian. They volunteer at local food banks.
The difference is that most of those institutions are not sitting on nearly $210 million in annual revenue while paying their CEO $740,000 and then wrapping the unpaid labor ask in the moral language of civic duty.
The Obama Foundation isn't a scrappy nonprofit stretching every dollar. It is a massive, well-funded operation with a 22-story museum tower and a payroll that more than doubled in six years. It could pay these workers. It is choosing not to.
That choice tells you something about how the people who run institutions like this think about the people they claim to serve. The South Side residents who show up as volunteer ambassadors will greet visitors, answer questions, and represent the center to the world.
The former White House aides in the executive suite will collect salaries that place them comfortably in the top 1% of American earners.
The foundation calls them "ambassadors." A more honest term might be "unpaid staff with a nicer title."
The progressive nonprofit world has perfected this trick. Dress up institutional self-interest in the language of empowerment.
Invoke community while building a payroll that serves insiders. Ask the people closest to the mission to sacrifice the most, while the people furthest from it sacrifice the least.
Barack Obama built a political career on the promise that he understood working people, that his years on the South Side gave him a perspective that Washington elites lacked. His foundation now asks the residents of that same South Side to work for free inside an $850 million monument to his presidency.
The 22-story tower will cast a long shadow over Jackson Park. The foundation should hope its volunteers don't read the tax filings.
