The Obama Foundation is looking for 75 to 100 unpaid "ambassadors" to greet visitors, give directions, and share information about exhibits at the $850 million Obama Presidential Center when it opens on Juneteenth.
Fox News reported that the volunteers will complement a staff of about 300 full- and part-time employees. The Foundation is pitching the free labor as a tribute to civic engagement.
That's one way to frame it. Here's another: an organization that pulled in nearly $210 million in total revenue in 2024 and paid its CEO $740,000 that same year would like you to work for nothing.
Valerie Jarrett, one of the Obamas' closest advisors and a former top Obama White House aide, became CEO of the Obama Foundation in 2021.
Federal filings show she has made $740,000 in each of the last three years on record: 2022, 2023, and 2024. She is overseeing development of the 19.3-acre campus in Chicago's Jackson Park, which features a 22-story museum tower and a Chicago Public Library branch.
Jarrett is not the only former Obama administration official who has done well at the Foundation. David Simas, a former White House political director, led the organization from 2017 to 2020 and made more than $600,000 annually.
Adewale Adeyemo, who later became Biden's deputy Treasury secretary, made roughly $540,000 during his tenure. Several other senior leaders with Obama administration ties earned between roughly $300,000 and $400,000 annually.
Total salaries and benefits across the organization grew from $18.5 million in 2018 to $43.7 million in 2024 as staffing expanded to 337 employees. Revenue kept pace, reaching nearly $210 million in 2024. This is not a scrappy nonprofit running bake sales. It is a quarter-billion-dollar operation asking strangers to donate their time so its campus runs smoothly on opening day.
The Foundation's press release leaned hard into the community-organizer mythology. From the announcement:
"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."
Jarrett added her own flourish, calling the center:
"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."
Noble sentiments. But the math tells a different story from the messaging. When top executives collect three-quarters of a million dollars annually, and the organization's payroll runs into the tens of millions, calling on community members to staff your venue for free is not civic engagement. It's cost management dressed in idealism.
This is a familiar playbook from the institutional left. The language is always about community, empowerment, and shared purpose. The compensation flows upward. The sacrifice flows downward. The people who write the press releases about civic duty never seem to be the ones working without a paycheck.
The Foundation has promoted the Obama Presidential Center as a $3.1 billion economic catalyst, projecting that figure in economic activity over 10 years. It has touted 5,000 construction jobs tied to the campus, noted that more than 50% of construction contracts went to diverse firms, highlighted that 33% of the construction workforce came from South and West Side communities, and pointed to 798 residents enrolled in construction pre-apprenticeship programs.
Those are real numbers. But they make the volunteer ask even harder to justify. If the center is genuinely generating billions in economic activity and the Foundation is flush enough to pay its CEO $740,000 year after year, why can't it pay the people greeting visitors at the door? Even a modest hourly wage for 100 workers would be a rounding error on a $43.7 million payroll.
It is worth noting that the salary range for the roughly 300 paid employees who will work alongside the volunteers has not been disclosed. That silence is its own kind of answer.
The Obama brand has always rested on a particular bargain: trust us with power and resources, and we will uplift the community. The presidential center was supposed to be the capstone of that promise, a gleaming South Side landmark that proved the investment paid off for everyone.
Instead, the Foundation built an $850 million campus, staffed its executive suite with six-figure alumni of the Obama White House, and then turned to the neighborhood and asked for free help. The community organizer's foundation organized the community, all right. It organized them into unpaid shifts.
There is nothing illegal about volunteer programs. Museums and cultural institutions across the country use them. But most of those institutions are not sitting on $210 million in annual revenue while their leadership collects compensation packages that would make a mid-market CEO blush.
The question is not whether volunteerism is valuable. It is. The question is whether an organization this wealthy has earned the right to ask for it.
