Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek. President Barack Obama is the 44th President of the United States. He was born on August 4th, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii, to a mother from Kansas, Stanley Ann Dunham, and a father from Kenya, Barack Obama Sr. He was also raised by his grandfather, who served in Patton’s army, and his grandmother, who worked her way up from the secretarial pool to become vice president at a local bank. He worked his way through school—Occidental College in Los Angeles, Columbia University in New York, and later, Harvard Law School—with the help of scholarship money and student loans. In 1985, Barack Obama moved to Chicago, where he got his start in community organizing on the city’s South Side, working to help rebuild communities devastated by the closure of local steel plants. The President called that time in his life "the best education I ever had, better than anything I got at Harvard Law School." He has credited that experience as crucial to finding his identity—something that shaped his path to the White House. Barack Obama was elected to the Illinois State Senate in 1996. During his time in Springfield, he passed the first major ethics reform in 25 years, cut taxes for working families, and expanded health care for children and their parents. Elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004, he reached across the aisle to pass the farthest-reaching lobbying reform in a generation, lock up the world’s most dangerous weapons, and bring transparency to government by tracking federal spending online.