Barack Obama Blog Biography

July 1983: After spending well over a year at a financial services job in Manhattan, Barack Obama has finally decided that his immediate future would be better served as a community organizer. Always a believer in helping people and the common man, Obama believes his talents are better suited to efforts such as housing and voter registration.

Finding nothing but dead ends in New York (a first attempt in becoming an organizer led to a quick introduction to living at the poverty line), Obama has packed his few things in a car and driven to Chicago, Illinois at the bequest of Gerald Kaufman of the Calumet Community Religious Conference. Less a league of churches for religious advancement and more a loose federation of peoples looking for help with unemployment, home forclosure and other community ailments, the churches of the CCRC and Developing Communities Project (DCP) represent the most common and natural rallying grounds for black people and so provide an existing organizational structure for those in need and those trying to help.

Obama will surely find solace in a city with a recently elected black mayor, a man who stands as an immense source of pride for so many in the Chicago area, and a frustration for so many others. Chicago is, in 1983, desperately in need of individuals and organizations who are willing to give up the lucrative lifestyle of the corporate world for days spent petitioning for voter rights, homes and pensions.