Rumana Ahmed reflects on her experience in the Obama administration, in which she served in a variety of positions in the Office of Presidential Correspondence (OPC) and Office of Public Engagement (OPE), and on the National Security Council (NSC) staff as a senior advisor in the Office for Global Engagement and Strategic Communications from 2014 to 2017. Ahmed focuses on the administration's maint enance of relations with key public constituencies, and describes her efforts to facilitate dialogue between the White House and Muslim American, Arab American, and Iranian American communities. She outlines the function of outside input to the administration's policy processes, and provides details about efforts and initiatives with which she was closely involved, including the White House Champions of Change program; Affordable Care Act enrollment campaigns; Countering Violent Extremism programs; and the administration's normalization of relations with Cuba. Also discussed are Ahmed's experience as a Muslim woman in the Obama White House, the importance of regular dialogue with ordinary Americans to the Obama administration, Obama's June 2009 speech in Cairo, and the power of White House events and programming to generate momentum for political and community action
Presidents--United States; United States Foreign relations Cuba; Ahmed, Rumana; Obama, Barack; National Security Council (U.S.); United States. White House Office of Correspondence and Presidential Messages; United States; Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
Format
oral histories
Genre
Interviews
Date
2022
Physical Description
64 pages
Note (Biographical)
Rumana Ahmed served in the Obama White House in three different offices over more than six years. She started in 2009 as a volunteer in the Office of Presidential Correspondence, became an intern in that office in 2010, and a staffer in August of 2011 . She then moved on to the Office of Public Engagement in 2012 before becoming a senior advisor in the Office for Global Engagement and Strategic Communications on the National Security Council staff from 2014 to 2017. After leaving the federal government, she was a fellow at Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership and, in 2023, she joined the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as a senior program officer for global policy and advocacy
Note
Interviewed by Evan D. McCormick on April 8, 2022. This interview is part of the Columbia University: Obama Presidency Oral History
Note (Provenance)
Rumana A. Ahmed, Gift, transferred from Columbia Center for Oral History Research 2023