Michelle Obama launches Global Girls Alliance

WASHINGTON — Former first lady Michelle Obama launched a new Obama Foundation program on Thursday, the Global Girls Alliance, putting an infrastructure in place to nourish one of her White House signature issues.

“When you educate a girl, you educate a family, a community, a country,” Obama said on NBC’s “Today Show.” “It makes no sense that the strength of our families, that girls and women are not getting educated, that they are not in school.”

With the announcement timed to the International Day of the Girl on Thursday, the program addresses the problem of 98 million girls who face barriers to education. A GoFundMe drive to launch the fund was also announced Thursday to provide money to groups around the world devoted to girls education. There is no cash donation at this time from the Obama Foundation or the Obamas to this fund, a foundation spokesman said.

The first lady created “Let Girls Learn” in 2015, but the Trump administration did not continue to use that brand.

A foundation spokesman told the SunTimes, “We soft-launched the network for grass-roots leaders earlier this summer, and it now includes about 1,400 grass-roots leaders from around the world. For the past several months, these leaders have been sharing their work with each other and suggesting resources for each other based on mutual interests.”

Michelle and W

In the “Today Show” interview, Obama told the backstory of former President George W. Bush handing her what looked like a cough drop at the funeral for late U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, on Sept. 1 in the National Cathedral.

“I didn’t realize at the time that anybody noticed what we were doing. President Bush and I … we are forever seatmates because of protocol, that’s how we sit at all the official functions, so he is my partner in crime at every major thing where all the formers gather,” she said. “So we’re together all the time, and I love him to death.”

It turned out that Bush passed her Altoids — from his time in the White House.

“I will add they were old cough drops. That’s the funny thing, because they were in the little White House box, and I was like, ‘How long have you had these?’ And he said, ‘A long time. We got a lot of these!’ ”