THE WOODS FUND.

Ari Berman does some good investigative work and examines the Woods Fund, the nonprofit on whose board Obama and Ayers both sat. It turns out to have been an association dedicated to bomb making and pig killing grants for community organizing, and Obama's involvement in it is actually quite worth exploring:

Lost in the media brouhaha are the facts about what the Woods Fund actually does, why it attracted someone like Obama and how Ayers came to be on its board. This story is less sexy than the current gotcha games, but the composition of the organization and its commitment to community organizing tell us a lot more about Obama than mischaracterizations of his association with Ayers. As Michelle Obama once put it, "Barack is not a politician first and foremost. He's a community activist exploring the viability of politics to make change."The Woods Fund, in many ways, is responsible for helping start Obama as an organizer and shaping his political identity. In 1985 the foundation gave a $25,000 grant to the Developing Communities Project, which hired Obama, at 24, as an organizer on Chicago's economically depressed South Side. Obama became friendly with Woods director Jean Rudd, and after he graduated from Harvard Law School and moved back to Chicago, Rudd asked him to join the board, which met four times a year to review grant proposals. (Obama also served on the board of the larger Joyce Foundation, which specialized in environmental conservation, welfare reform and education.) "Community organizing was a central priority of this foundation, so more and more we drew him in," says Rudd, who retired in 2000.[...]Established by Nebraska businessmen in 1941, with a current endowment of $68 million and annual grants totaling $3 million--a tiny figure in the foundation world--the Woods Fund has taken risks that larger foundations can't. It awards hundreds of small grants a year, usually no larger than $50,000, to activists, neighborhood groups, think tanks, and arts and culture projects in Chicago's most-forgotten and blighted communities. It has funded ex-offenders to lobby for the elimination of mandatory minimum sentences and unfair drug laws, organized senior citizens to advocate for affordable housing, pushed parents to get more involved in their children's crumbling schools. The fund has linked public policy groups with community organizers--wonks with activists--a particular interest of Obama's. "The grants are small, but the impact is significant," says Jesus Garcia, vice chair of the board and the first Mexican-American elected to the Illinois senate.

It's an interesting commentary on the state of our media that despite all the attention given to the Obama-Ayers connection, folks haven't even learned about the Woods Fund as a side effect. You'd expect that with all the words written, clips run, and tenuous connections aired, they'd at least be able to be accidentally informative as to the actualt relevance of the subject at hand. But no.