Coming to columbia this fall, obama foundation scholars

pulse

June 28, 2018 7:15 AM

New York City lost out to Chicago in the bidding for President Barack Obama’s presidential library and center, but the Obama Foundation is now fulfilling a pledge it made in 2015 to “maintain a presence” here.

This fall, Columbia University, Obama’s alma mater, will launch a program for international fellows, the foundation and school planned to announce Thursday.

The yearlong program will bring an inaugural group of 12 fellows to Columbia, providing them with stipends and paying their expenses. One scholar in the initial class is the co-founder of a foundation in Bulgaria that aims to create and promote digital tools to enhance civic engagement. Another is the co-founder of a Singapore nonprofit that provides reusable menstrual products to women in poor communities. Still another is a partner at a Nigerian company that simplifies budgets and public finance documents to make government more transparent.

“They are really wonderful people from around the world,” said Lee Bollinger, the university’s president. “One of the things we find especially exciting is coming up with a unique and discrete curriculum that will appeal to them.”

Known as the Obama Foundation Scholars at Columbia University, the program will not operate out of a specific graduate school. Instead, it will fall under the aegis of a new initiative called Columbia World Projects and operate out of the university’s new Manhattanville campus.

The Obama Presidential Center is expected to open in 2021 on Chicago’s South Side, where Obama’s political career took root. And while the Chicago City Council recently approved the project on a 19-acre site in that city’s Jackson Park, the project has also been sued by a nonprofit group, Protect Our Parks, over its use of the park’s land.

The Obama Foundation has already been active in trying to encourage more civic engagement in Chicago and has been involved in education efforts. This year, the foundation announced it would work with the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy to create a master’s program, with a focus on international development and policy.

Unlike at the University of Chicago, the scholars who are selected for Columbia’s program — now 12 but eventually expected to grow to 25 in number — won’t earn degrees. The current group, whose members range in age from their late 20s to their early 40s, are expected to meet with Obama at some point and also be active in New York City civic life, said Bernadette Meehan, the chief international officer at the Obama Foundation, which is overseeing the program.

“We are looking for emerging leaders who are at the tipping point of their career,” she said. “We expect them to be active in local organizations, and with service projects, and taking those lessons back with them.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.