Our Commitment to Diversity

By 2022, we expect 33% of the Obama Foundation operations spend will be with diverse vendors.

While there is little public information against which to benchmark, industry experts from the Civic Consulting Alliance and A.T. Kearney noted that a majority of organizations that publicly release targets, set goals under the 25% mark for similar operations spending.

We're releasing our targets to be transparent about plans in an effort to encourage others to reach as high as possible.

We will publicly release our annual diverse spend so others can evaluate how we are tracking against the goals we set for ourselves.

Organizations are increasingly beginning to publish their diverse spend. We encourage others to embrace a similar reporting standard so we can learn from one another and compare our progress. Our reporting standard is to compare all available diverse spend dollars and to include any organization with diverse ownership in the count.

In 2018, 24% of our operations spend was with diverse vendors.

We encourage our partners to put diversity first.

The field of supplier development is where we find truly promising examples of what it looks like when large institutions value diversity. While at this stage of our life cycle the Foundation does not have robust procurement needs that demand a deep bench of suppliers, we will continue to learn from others and amplify the work that companies like Exelon and United are doing in this space.

• We’re encouraging our partners to have diverse leadership including at the board level.

• We're encouraging them to value diversity in hiring, spending, and supplier development.

• We're encouraging them to sponsor students from the Obama Youth Jobs Corps to create opportunities for underserved youth.

In 2018, we spent close to $7 million with 150 diverse businesses—$3.6 million of which went to Chicago-based companies.

We’re looking to work with vendors from the following categories:

We’ve met with dozens of Chicagoans across the City to let them know about available opportunities, whether they are interested in providing services for the Foundation itself or aim to be part of the workforce that will build the Obama Presidential Center.