Maya Soetoro has returned home to Hawaiʻi after attending the dedication and opening of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago.
Soetoro is the Director of the Matsunaga Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, and the sister of Barack Obama.
The Obama Presidential Center is a sprawling campus complete with a public library, a museum dedicated to Barack Obama's life, and even an NBA regulation-size basketball court.
Soetoro spoke with HPR and shared what it was like to tour the center for the first time with her older brother.
“It was a very moving experience. The whole time in Chicago allowed us to not only have reunion with old friends from D.C. and Chicago, but also connect with new community to renew our optimism,” she told HPR.
“The opening was really helping us to remember that optimism isn't naive, that it's actually a choice and a discipline … that we can choose to have courageous optimism that we can renew our commitment to democracy and collaboration.”
For Soetoro, touring the Obama Presidential Center was a chance to witness a thriving community come alive and come together.
“I saw it as it was meant to be experienced — with lots of children in the playground, with intergenerational connection at picnic tables, and with elders reading to their kids in the library,” she said.
“Sitting in reflection at the garden named after our mother helped me to feel that we are all in a place where we need to parent ourselves, but also nourish and love on one another,” Soetoro recalled.
“We mustn't give up on one another. We mustn't give up on the project of democracy.”
This story aired on The Conversation on June 30, 2026. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Jinwook Lee adapted this story for the web.
