"Non-profit" foundations that fail to pay a fair share of local, state and federal taxes, like the Chicago-based Joyce and MacArthur foundations, are supposed to be just politically non-partisan "charitable" organizations. Yet during the 1990's, both Joyce Foundation and MacArthur Foundation executives apparently helped launch Democratic Party leader and future Democratic President (and possible 2020 Democratic Party vice-presidential nominee/candidate?) Barack Obama's politically partisan office-seeking career; by arranging to have Obama sit on the Joyce Foundation's board of directors in 1994. As David Garrow noted in his 2017 Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama book:
"...Barack...talked [in 1994]...with Sokoni Karanja about a prospective leadership training and development project...Eighteen months earlier Sokoni had been awarded a $320,000 MacArthur Foundation `genius grant' and the Woods Fund already had committed a further $72,000 toward his effort...
"...Barack's range of acquaintances was growing too, and one of the most significant new onews was Deborah Leff...producer at ABC News before being recruited as president of the Joyce Foundation in 1992. Thanks to a family timber fortune, Joyce for a quarter century had been a significant grant maker...
"...Leff recommended Barack...as a...new board member...Barack's election to Joyce's board was announced just after Thanksgiving 1994."
The same book also recalled:
"Equally significant was Debbie Leff's recommendation of Barack to a pair of fellow presidents of prominent Chicago foundations, Adele Smith Simmons at MacArthur and Patricia A. Graham at Spencer. One year earlier publishing billionaire Walter Annenberg had pledged $500 million...Wieboldt Foundation executive director Anne Hallett had left that post to create a new national network...Professor Bill Ayers...immediately queried Hallett and new Joyce Foundation education program officer Warren Chapman about Annenberg's potential...They submitted a final proposal...requesting $49.2 million...Hallett and Ayers reached out to Patricia Graham at Spencer...
"A Chicago entity would be needed to administer the Annenberg grant...and Graham in turn asked her fellow foundation presidents Adele Simmons and Debbie Leff to join her. The three women met for breakfast in mid-December [1994], and then held several more meetings with Hallett and Ayers in early January [1995]...A local board for the new organization would have to be chosen, and Debbie strongly recommended Barack...Pat Graham agreed to ask Barack, and invited him to meet her for a mid-February [1995] dinner at a well-known Italina restaurant...
"At dinner that night with Barack, Pat Graham...popped the question, explaining how she, Debbie, and Adele all wanted him to chair the new Chicago Annenberg Challenge board...At another breakfast meeting, Pat, Debbie, and Anne introduced Barack and Bill Ayers to each other...Ayers was well known in Chicago...His father Thomas G. Ayers...had...been...the longtime head of Commonwealth Edison...
"...By mid-March [1995] a board...was in place, and at its first meeting, Pat Graham's motion to elect Barack as their chair was unanimously adopted...The Chicago Annenberg Challenge reached the midpoint of its five years in mid-1997, jsut as the board mad its largest allocation of dollars to date. Notable was a grant of $750,000 to Bill Ayers's {project]..."
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