T

An economist from a British university would later put out a study that
looked at the test performances of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson students, finding
that their overall scores jumped significantly after I’d started connecting with
them—the equivalent of moving from a C average to an A. Any credit for
improvement really belonged to the girls, their teachers, and the daily work they
did together, but it also affirmed the idea that kids will invest more when they
feel they’re being invested in. I understood that there was power in showing
children my regard.

wo months after Hadiya Pendleton’s funeral, I returned to Chicago. I’d
directed Tina, my chief of staff and an attorney who herself had spent many years
in the city, to throw her energy into rallying support for violence prevention
there. Tina was a bighearted policy wonk with an infectious laugh and more
hustle than just about anyone I knew. She understood which levers to pull inside
and outside government to make an impact at the scale I envisioned. Moreover,
her nature and experience wouldn’t allow her voice to go unheard, especially at
tables dominated by men, where she often found herself. Throughout Barack’s
second term, she would wrestle with the Pentagon and various state governors to
clear away red tape so that veterans and military spouses could more efficiently
build their careers, and she’d also help engineer a mammoth new administration-
wide effort centered on girls’ education worldwide.

In the wake of Hadiya’s death, Tina had leveraged her local contacts,
encouraging Chicago business leaders and philanthropists to work with Mayor
Rahm Emanuel to expand community programs for at-risk youth across the city.
Her efforts had helped yield $33 million in pledges in just a matter of weeks. On
a cool day in April, Tina and I flew out to attend a meeting of community leaders
discussing youth empowerment, and also to meet a new group of kids.

Earlier that winter, the public radio program This American Life had devoted
two hours to telling the stories of students and staff from William R. Harper
Senior High School in Englewood, a neighborhood on the South Side. In the
previous year, twenty-nine of the school’s current and recent students had been
shot, eight of them fatally. These numbers were astonishing to me and my staff,
but the sad fact is that urban schools around the country were contending with
epidemic levels of gun violence. Amid all the talk of youth empowerment, it
seemed important to actually sit down and hear from the youth.