Where Can I Find Out Details About Obama’s Career As A Community Organizer?

January 27, 2010 – 10:58 pm

He always says it was an important part of his experience but I can’t find any information on what kind of a job he did.
What major successes did he have?
What failures?
What exactly did he do?
How does the skill set he developed in that role translate to the role of President of the United States?

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  1. 5 Responses to “Where Can I Find Out Details About Obama’s Career As A Community Organizer?”

  2. I’d like to know too.

    By Robert B on Jan 27, 2010

  3. This is all I have been able to find:
    Obama moved to Chicago in 1985, a little more than a year after he graduated from Columbia University in NYC. He was 24 years old. He was hired by Jerry Kellman, a Chicago organizer, to lead the Developing Communities Project (DCP), which would target African American neighborhoods on Chicago’s South Side by working with African American churches in the area. During Obama’s time as a community organizer, Harold Washington was serving as Chicago’s first black mayor. This was a source of hope and inspiration for Obama and other blacks and progressives in the city.
    A community organizer is: Community organizing is a process by which disempowered people—most often low- and moderate-income people—are brought together to act in their common self-interest. Community organizers act as area-wide coordinators of programs for different agencies in an attempt to meet community needs for health and welfare services. They also facilitate self-help programs initiated by local common-interest groups, for example, by training local leaders to analyze and solve the problems of a community. Community organizers work actively, as do other types of social workers, in community councils of social agencies and in community-action groups. At times the role of community organizers overlaps that of the social planners.

    By Joe Wilson was right! on Jan 28, 2010

  4. Dreams of my Father contains chapters and chapters about what he did. Read it.
    The most important thing for me is that it shows he was out to help people, not out to make the most money he could. He has made several choices of that kind. After law school, he turned down lucrative offers at prestigious firms to practice civil rights law. Someone who comes at the job of President with that mindset will make a difference in this country in a way that someone who is just power hungry never could.

    By slykitty on Jan 28, 2010

  5. You can start with his book, “Dreams of my father.”
    Then you would have to go to library to find Chicago public records on not-for-profit groups and search for his name as an applicant.

    By quovazi on Jan 28, 2010

  6. You could probably fish around in some public records in Chicago but I wonder why Obama doesn’t discuss all of his accomplishments in Chicago himself..

    By Brian on Jan 28, 2010

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