A Slow Start Followed by a Steady Rise to Success

When Michael Strautmanis arrived as a freshman at Saint Ignatius College Prep in Chicago, he felt like he didn’t belong. By the time he graduated in 1987, Jesuits and other positive role models had convinced him he belonged just as much as anyone else. “I was loved, and led, and welcomed into this,” he says.

As a student at Chicago’s Saint Ignatius College Prep (SICP), Michael Strautmanis (’87) had his doubts about his ability to succeed. He was intimidated by the school’s reputation. He wasn’t a rule follower; he felt like he always knew better. He wasn’t Catholic or even very religious. He felt like he didn’t belong.

But the leadership at SIPC saw things differently. They had expectations for him, he says, and as it turned out, the tools to succeed had been in him all along. First, they brought him closer to God.

“I saw that there was something bigger than myself—a God,” says Strautmanis, the chief corporate affairs officer of The Obama Foundation and former chief of staff for senior White House advisor Valerie Jarrett. “And God saw me as important. He wanted me to achieve something bigger.”

There were mentors along the way at SICP—the one who connected him with an SICP alumnus who had a T-shirt selling business outside Wrigley Field, and another who offered him a role with the Harlequins, which led to his majoring in theater at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Succeeding outside of school, adopting the discipline to show up and commit, taught him he could achieve all he was capable of. Today, he strives for continuous improvement, what he calls the driving force of his life.

“I learned the fundamentals of this at St. Ignatius, not through heavy-handed methods, not through indoctrination,” he says. “I was loved, and led, and welcomed into this.”

An attorney and the former general counsel to USAID, Strautmanis helped open the Barack Obama Presidential Center. Every morning for the past few years, drawing on his Jesuit education, he has practiced the Ignatian Daily Examen of Consciousness.

“When I started at the White House, I had to ask why it happened,” he says. “I had to realize that I was a part of a larger story, to speak on behalf of others—those who didn’t have a voice, perhaps. There’s a standard for that, and we know it well at our Jesuit schools, to be a man or woman for others. That’s my purpose in life. If I can go out and study and advocate for others, I will have succeeded.”