When President Barack Obama spoke at the White House on Feb. 27 to announce the \u201cMy Brother\u2019s Keeper\u201d initiative, he made mention of 2001 Furman graduate Maurice Owens. The initiative is an effort to improve the expected educational and life outcomes for \u201cboys and young men of color,\u201d and Obama talked about how Owens had overcome some difficult challenges to achieve success in the world. Owens currently works in the White House as special assistant to chief of staff Denis McDonough.<\/p>\n
\u201cMoe,\u201d as President Obama referred to Owens, is a graduate of Furman\u2019s political science program. He started work at the White House under President George W. Bush as a network systems maintenance and audio-visual technician, and then assumed the role of Situation Room communicator under President Obama. Since February 2013, Owens has served as McDonough\u2019s special assistant, which entails executing special projects and assisting with the office\u2019s day-to-day operations.<\/p>\n
The transcript<\/a><\/b> of President Obama\u2019s speech, as well as the video<\/a><\/b> (Owens\u2019 mention begins at about 35:30), is available online.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When President Barack Obama spoke at the White House on Feb. 27 to announce the \u201cMy Brother\u2019s Keeper\u201d initiative, he made mention of 2001 Furman graduate Maurice Owens. The initiative […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":12861,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2001","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","category-in-the-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2001","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2001"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2001\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}