Former President Barack Obama says presidential center will transform South Side and become 'a unive
With his Obama Presidential Center, former President Barack Obama wants to create a beacon that sends out a signal of hope to young organizers, leaders, community workers and change agents, he said Tuesday night.
And he wants the center on the South Side, in the community where he got his start as an organizer, where his wife grew up and where they built a collective of supporters and friends, he said.
“For us just to have some office downtown somewhere, from which we issue reports, and occasionally travel for photo ops, wasn’t going to cut it,” he said. “We joke about it a little: like this is the mothership. We want (it) to be a university for activism and social change.”
Obama appeared onstage at the third annual Obama Foundation Summit, which was held on the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Bronzeville. He was joined onstage by four of his Obama Foundation fellows and they were interviewed all together by the actress Yara Shahidi.
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