A liberal activist group connected to both the disgraced and now defunct group ACORN and Barack Obama is closing its doors in Chicago, citing troubles raising funds.

In a public notice, Chicago’s Project Vote informed supporters that it would “suspend operations indefinitely” starting May 31.

“The decision was made by the board of directors and management of Project Vote,” the notice read, “and it was not made lightly.”

“The funding environment for voting rights and civic engagement work has never been easy,” the statement continued, “and it has grown increasingly challenging over the past few years as foundations have cut back on their giving… competition for limited funding has increased.”

The group went on to insist that its lack of a “diverse portfolio of work” has made it practically impossible to raise enough funds to continue its activism.

After listing some of its successes, the statement went on to thank its employees and supporters and noted some of the foundations that supported them in the past.

The list included the Agua Fund, the Arkay Foundation, CREDO Mobile, the Herb Blok Foundation, and several others.

The statement ended on an anti-Trump note saying, “We had hoped to spend this year pushing back against the Trump administration’s inevitable attack on voting rights” and hoped that other groups would continue the fight.

Chicago’s Project Vote was part of a series of left-wing activist groups that served to help a young Barack Obama cut his “community organizer” teeth when he first came to the Windy City after finishing his education.

Not long after law school, after Obama had moved back to Chicago full time, the future president joined some of the efforts of the ACORN-sponsored Project Vote to being his political career.

In 1992 Obama directed a Chicago voter registration drive for Project Vote. The effort served as one of his earliest introductions into Chicago’s liberal establishment and became a stepping stone for his first run for public office in 1996, when he became an Illinois state Senator serving in Springfield, the state’s capital.

Project Vote was likely working on some of the same projects with the now defunct ACORN liberal activist group during the time Obama was running his voter registration drive. But the two organizations didn’t become officially associated until a short time after Obama worked with Project Vote.

The future president did work with ACORN directly between 1992 and 2004 when he was contracted by the group to help train its employees.

ACORN was later disgraced and revealed as corrupt. It closed its doors after Breitbart News founder Andrew Breitbart, Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe, and insider activist Anita MonCreif teamed up to release information, as well as a series of videos, showing ACORN willingly breaking laws to further its left-wing causes. ACORN suspended its operations in September of 2009.

Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com