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From Pole Vaulter to Member of Parliament Jamahl Strachan went to Washington in the summer of 2008 to work as an intern on Capitol Hill, where as a rising senior at UMES he landed a coveted assignment in the office of the junior senator from Illinois. That fall, the latter became the United States’ first Black president. Strachan, now 33, is the Bahamas’ youngest Member of Parliament. Strachan finished his studies at UMES in 2011 with two degrees — a bachelor’s and master’s in criminal justice — and with a new-found yearning to return to the Bahamas to make a difference in people’s lives. “I felt I had to go home,” he said. “You can’t spend all your time at university.” After seeing a poster on a Hazel Hall bulletin board and encouragement from a UMES professor, Strachan secured a Comcast Diversity Congressional Scholarship, a program that exposed undergraduates at historically Black institutions to the work of Congress. Strachan was not immediately assigned to a Congressional office. A week later, however, he got a message to report to Obama’s U.S Senate office. By early June it was clear Obama would be the 2008 Democratic Party nominee for president; Strachan’s ambitious fellow interns unsuccessfully lobbied him to trade assignments. He showed up for work and recalled an office staffer greeted him with a typical ice-breaker question: “Which part of Illinois are you from?”
FEBRUARY 2022
Strachan embraced the assignment as a challenge just the way he would “as a competitive student-athlete” as a pole vaulter on the UMES track team. “I had absolutely no knowledge of Illinois,” he said. “So, I devoted myself to learning everything I could about the state and the people Sen. Obama represented.” Strachan interacted with Obama three times that summer, including a photo session on the Capitol steps the senator made time to attend to show appreciation for his work. “It shows you how your life can change in an instant,” Strachan said. Finding work back home right away was difficult. He eventually landed a position with IBM, then was recruited to work for the Bahamian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. While thankful to being able to serve his country, the life of a desk-bound bureaucrat did not excite him. In 2015, Strachan headed to Beijing, where he said he earned a master’s degree in international law from the China Foreign Affairs University. At 28, Strachan borrowed a page from community-organizer Obama’s early career playbook and started a non-profit, “The Future of our Neighborhoods.” Strachan enlisted a network of friends and acquaintances to join him in mounting a grassroots campaigns to clean up down-on-their-luck neighborhoods and address “food security” woes facing Nassau Village neighbors. His image as an emerging philanthropist got noticed. “I resigned from my job not knowing whether an election would even be called,” he said of the former British colony’s election system, adding “I have no issues not knowing what I’m going to do next.” Strachan has not had contact with former President Obama since 2008, but noted “I wrote to him while I was vying to be a Member of Parliament.” He swept into office in September 2021, garnering, he said, 75 percent of the vote to represent the Nassau Village region. Strachan credits taking a chance on coming to America for a college education as “a once in a lifetime opportunity.” “The reality is that – that was my springboard,” he said. “I’d like to think my story – so far – shows the sky is the limit,” he said.
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