The Obama Foundation is recruiting 75 to 100 unpaid volunteers to staff the $850 million Obama Presidential Center in Chicago when it opens on Juneteenth, even as CEO Valerie Jarrett collected $740,000 in compensation last year.
The volunteers, branded as "ambassadors," will greet visitors, give directions, and share information about exhibits. They will complement a workforce of about 300 full- and part-time employees. It is unclear what the salary range for those paid workers will be.
What is clear: the people at the top are doing just fine.
Fox News reports the foundation framed the volunteer program in the language you'd expect:
"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, the former top Obama aide who became CEO in 2021, added her own pitch:
"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."
So the vision is this: a nearly billion-dollar campus on 19.3 acres in Jackson Park, featuring a 22-story museum tower, funded by an organization pulling in nearly $210 million in annual revenue, asking regular people to show up and work for nothing. For the vision.
The Obama Foundation's tax filings paint a picture of an organization that has no trouble compensating the people it wants to compensate. Jarrett has made $740,000 in each of the last three years on file: 2022, 2023, and 2024. Before her, former White House political director David Simas made more than $600,000 annually while leading the organization from 2017 to 2020. Adewale Adeyemo, who later became Biden's deputy Treasury secretary, made roughly $540,000 during his tenure. Other senior leaders pulled in roughly $300,000 to $400,000 annually.
Total salaries and benefits across the foundation have surged from $18.5 million in 2018 to $43.7 million in 2024. Staffing expanded to 337 employees. Revenue climbed to nearly $210 million.
This is not a scrappy nonprofit stretching every dollar. This is a quarter-billion-dollar-a-year operation with executive compensation that rivals the private sector. And it needs you to volunteer.
There's something almost too perfect about the arrangement. The foundation promotes the presidential center as a $3.1 billion economic catalyst, projecting that figure in economic activity over ten years. A Deloitte Consulting LLP assessment supports the claim. The foundation touts 5,000 construction jobs tied to the campus, more than 50% of construction contracts awarded to diverse firms, 33% of the construction workforce drawn from South and West Side communities, and 798 residents enrolled in construction pre-apprenticeship programs.
Those are real numbers, and they matter to the people who got those jobs. But the construction phase ends. The building opens. And when it does, the foundation's model for ongoing staffing includes a tier of workers who earn exactly zero.
The foundation built a gleaming monument to civic engagement on Chicago's South Side, a community that has needed economic investment for decades. It then structured the operation so that the former president's closest allies earn six and seven figures while neighborhood residents are invited to contribute their time for free. The economic catalyst, it turns out, catalyzes in one direction.
This is the nonprofit-industrial complex operating exactly as designed. Enormous sums flow in. Executive compensation inflates. The mission statement does the heavy lifting that the budget won't. When an organization with $210 million in annual revenue asks people to work unpaid, the word "volunteerism" is doing a lot of work. It's not a neighborhood food drive. It's staffing a professional operation.
Museums across the country use volunteers. That's true. But most of those museums aren't sitting on nine-figure annual budgets while paying their CEO three-quarters of a million dollars. The scale of the gap between the top and the bottom of this organization is what makes the ask notable.
When the money is there, and the choice is still to not pay, that tells you something about priorities.
Barack Obama built his political identity on community organizing. The entire mythology of his rise depends on the idea that he chose service over profit, that he went to the South Side when he could have gone to Wall Street. The Obama Foundation leans on that origin story every chance it gets.
But the foundation bearing his name now operates with the budget of a mid-size corporation and the compensation structure to match. The community it claims to serve gets a volunteer application. Valerie Jarrett gets $740,000. David Simas got $600,000. The deputy who parlayed his foundation role into a Biden administration appointment got $540,000.
The center opens in June. The ambassadors will smile, point visitors toward exhibits, and share the story of a presidency. They just won't be paid to do it.
The executives will.
