The Obama Presidential Center, an $850 million campus in Chicago's Jackson Park, announced this week that it is recruiting up to 100 unpaid volunteers to greet visitors and guide guests when the facility opens on Juneteenth. The center calls them "ambassadors."

According to the Daily Mail, the center's chief executive, Valerie Jarrett, a former senior adviser in the Obama White House and close friend of both Barack and Michelle Obama, earned $740,000 in compensation in 2024. She earned the same amount in 2023. And in 2022.

So the math here is simple. A foundation sitting on annual revenue approaching $210 million, with total salaries and benefits ballooning from $18.5 million in 2018 to $43.7 million in 2024, needs free labor to staff its front doors.

Service for thee, seven figures for me

Jarrett framed the volunteer program in the language you'd expect:

"The Obama Presidential Center is 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."

She continued, saying the ambassadors "will create a welcoming and inclusive experience for visitors while representing the strength, resilience, and leadership of this community." Together, she added, "we are building something that inspires service, connection, and action far beyond our walls."

The Obama Foundation leaned into the framing as well, stating that 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."

There's a pattern here worth noticing. The people at the top of progressive institutions always seem to believe deeply in sacrifice, so long as someone else is doing the sacrificing. Jarrett pulls three quarters of a million dollars annually. The foundation employs 337 people across a payroll north of $43 million. But when it comes time to put warm bodies at the welcome desk, the budget apparently runs dry.

The campus and the contradictions

To be fair, the Obama Presidential Center is an ambitious project. The 19.3-acre campus features:

• An eight-story museum made of granite, standing 225 feet tall
• Four floors of exhibits from the Obama presidency
• An 83-foot-tall abstract glass work collage created by artist Julie Mehretu, inspired by African and American history
• Words from Obama's speech marking the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches, displayed on the building's exterior

An economic analysis conducted by Deloitte projected the center could produce $3.1 billion in economic impact over a decade and create thousands of jobs tied to construction and operations. The foundation has touted that more than 50 percent of construction contracts went to "diverse firms," that about one-third of the construction workforce came from Chicago's South and West Side neighborhoods, and that nearly 800 residents participated in construction pre-apprenticeship programs.

The center is expected to employ roughly 300 full- and part-time workers once it launches in June. Three hundred paid employees, and still the foundation needs a hundred people to show up for free.

The Jarrett question

Jarrett joined the Obama Foundation as CEO in 2021. Her connection to the Obamas is not incidental to the role. In her own memoir, she wrote:

"I was afforded my unique access because I understood that being a friend is being a friend."

That's refreshingly honest. In Washington and its orbiting nonprofit world, proximity to power is the most valuable currency there is. Jarrett understood that, leveraged it, and landed a position paying $740,000 a year at a foundation built around the legacy of the man she served in the White House.

None of this is illegal. None of it is even unusual by the standards of the nonprofit industrial complex that thrives in the shadow of every modern presidency. But it does reveal something about priorities. When Jarrett tells CBS News Chicago she's excited to open the center's doors, when she talks about "inclusion" being "a strength," when she expresses hope that visitors "learn a little something about themselves and how they can go and bring change home to their own communities," she is speaking from the comfortable side of a very specific arrangement. She gets compensated handsomely for managing the vision. The volunteers get the privilege of embodying it for free.

The nonprofit math

Federal tax filings tell a straightforward story. Revenue approaching $210 million. A payroll that more than doubled in six years. A CEO salary that hasn't budged from $740,000 across three consecutive years, which suggests it was set at that level deliberately and comfortably.

Meanwhile, the foundation's own language around the volunteer program invokes Obama's "long-standing emphasis on civic service and community engagement," referencing his presidential campaign's mobilization of 2.2 million volunteers and national service initiatives like the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act and United We Serve.

There is a difference between a grassroots political campaign asking supporters to knock on doors and an $850 million institution with a quarter-billion-dollar revenue stream asking locals to work its floor for nothing. The first is movement politics. The second is a staffing decision dressed up as civic virtue.

What this actually tells us

The Obama Presidential Center is not a government institution. It's not a presidential library in the traditional sense, administered by the National Archives. It is a privately funded foundation project, and it can staff itself however it likes. But the choice to recruit unpaid labor while the executive suite is extremely well compensated is a perfect distillation of how progressive institutions operate.

The language is always about community. The economics always flow upward. The people who talk most about service are rarely the ones being asked to serve without a paycheck. Jarrett said she hopes visitors learn "everyone can do something to be a force for good." Apparently, for a hundred of those visitors, that something is working for free at a campus that costs nearly a billion dollars to build.

The doors open on Juneteenth. The ambassadors will be ready. The CEO will be paid.