Former President Barack Obama urged organizers and social innovators gathered Monday at the Obama Foundation summit to be patient in their pursuits of wide-scale community change.
And in their moments of exhaustion, Obama said, they must remember that generations before them fought for equality, justice, environmental protections and other rights.
"You should be extraordinarily impatient about the injustices and nonsense and foolishness you see around you and you should be finding opportunities at every juncture to challenge those things," he said. "At the same time, you have to keep in your mind: Societies are these complex, organic things that you don't turn (like) switches. They evolve. They shift. They change."
Obama spoke for nearly an hour in a conversation with author Dave Eggers about his background as a community organizer, his experiences as a politician and writing his book _ a "brutal" process he joked is causing strain in his marriage now that Michelle Obama has begun her book tour. The former president also spoke about challenging institutions, racism and the lasting residue of segregation.
Rather than deliver a speech, Obama sat back seeming relaxed and answered questions about how to challenge power and how to harness it. At times he sounded like a college professor as he walked the audience through a history of civil rights in America, the history of democracy or some of Chicago's complicated social and political landscape history.
But he started his talk by ruminating on the summit's theme: "Common Hope, Uncommon Stories." He said that as a young organizer in Chicago's Roseland neighborhood, his first assignment was to simply visit with residents and listen to their personal stories. It was through that experience that he learned that all people are connected, he said.
The participants at the summit will have to harness those stories and that connection if they want to get their work done, Obama told them.
"There are few endeavors, human endeavors, that are worthwhile that you can do by yourself," he said. "The way power works at every level _ whether it's the United Nations or in your neighborhood _ is, 'do you have a community that stands behind what you stand for?' If you do, you'll have more power. If you don't, you won't."
The Obama summit is a two-day conference that brings together civic innovators and community activists from around the world to network, exchange ideas and use the Obama name to strengthen their platforms. Guests from 41 countries and 17 states attended this year. About 100 participants were from Chicago.
In many ways, the event showcases just what the foundation hopes to do once the Obama Presidential Center is built in Jackson Park.
Obama told the audience that he chose the South Side of Chicago for his presidential center because it represented a pivotal point in his life.
"This is not where I grew up, but this is where I discovered who I was," he said. "This is where all the different strands of me, that I'd been wrestling with my whole life cohered. I emerged from here a whole person.
"Chicago is this extraordinary laboratory. ... The world is converging here, in this powerful, amazing way," he said.
