On the walls still hung photos of Johnson with Obama — the pair meeting privately in the Oval Office, them in New Orleans eating with a half-dozen young black men. And a whiteboard with slogans Johnson scrawled with a blue marker more than six months ago to motivate his team: “Make the days count” -- a quote he attributed to boxing legend Muhammad Ali.

Johnson, chairman of the My Brother’s Keeper Task Force and a former telecom executive, was charged with overseeing Obama’s key initiative to boost the opportunities for disadvantaged, minority youth — a cause the president has vowed to continue championing after leaving office.

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It’s one that Johnson, too, keeps touting even in his final days at the White House. Obama launched My Brother’s Keeper in 2014, calling upon private industry to step up to support young men of color following the verdict in Trayvon Martin's shooting, in which the black teen's killer was acquitted. Armed with a report from Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, Johnson speaks of corporate responsibility as not just a moral obligation, but an investment that makes economic sense for businesses to embrace.

A black male born 25 years ago has only a 50 percent chance of being employed now — a result of early death, incarceration, low labor force participation and high unemployment, according to a Council of Economic Advisers report.

Young men of color are twice as likely to be unemployed as white men. Closing the gap in labor force participation between black and Hispanic men and white men ages 16 to 54 would boost the total U.S. GDP by 2 percent, the report said.

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Companies are responding to that argument, with more poised to pledge their support for the program, Johnson said in an interview with The Washington Post. Businesses and foundations, including Sprint, Prudential Financial, Starbucks, Ford and the National Basketball Association, have already invested more than $1 billion in My Brother’s Keeper.

“What drew them to invest even more and to see the righteousness of this is the economic side,” Johnson said.

Plank Industries and Under Armour, headquartered in Johnson’s home town of Baltimore, have also recently expressed interest in supporting the program. So, too, Johnson said, has Bank of America, based in Charlotte, where protests erupted after police fatally shot a black man outside his apartment complex in September.

Plank Industries, the private investment company of Under Armour chief executive Kevin Plank, is launching a training program for young people in Baltimore to break into the construction trade. It recently completed a pilot program with eight African American men in their 20s, all of whom got jobs right after their training, the company said.

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Tom Geddes, chief executive of Plank, said that he expects the training program to grow quickly, through a partnership with My Brother’s Keeper, given Plank’s large real estate development project in South Baltimore.

“We want to both help these young folks get skills, but as we’re creating jobs, we want to make sure we can hire people from Baltimore,” Geddes said. “We feel an obligation to be supportive. Collectively as a community, we are failing our young people of color.”

When Obama leaves office Friday, the work will continue through the My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization based in Washington headed by Blair Taylor, a former Starbucks executive.

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Johnson says he plans to continue playing a role. “A lot of this is now really about companies looking to invest as [My Brother’s Keeper] takes shape in the private space,” he said.