FCS Financial congratulates Dr. Mike Cook on his induction into the Cooperative Hall of Fame on May 2. Dr. Cook has served as an appointed member of the FCS Financial Board of Directors since 1989. He is truly deserving of this honor. Below is an excerpt about Dr. Cook and his award reprinted from CAFNRnews.Mike Cook has earned the title hero—a cooperative hero.
On May 2, he was inducted into the Cooperative Hall of Fame at Washington D.C.’s National Press Club after a public forum on cooperatives connected to the United Nations declaration of 2012 as the International Year of the Cooperative.
He has been a CEO, a mentor to CEOs of national and global cooperatives, counseled cooperative leaders in more than 40 countries, inspired students who have gone on to be leaders and award-winning professors and is still striving to solve the global hunger problem—a goal he’s pursued since serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Uruguay in the mid-1960s.
Cook, the Robert D. Partridge Endowed Professor in Cooperative Leadership and executive director of the Graduate Institute of Cooperative Leadership (GICL) in CAFNR’s Division of Applied Social Sciences, joins the likes of Howard Cowden, who was the founder of the cooperative that became Farmland Industries. An endowment in Cowden’s honor started GICL, which Cook has overseen since 1993.
“The roster of the Cooperative Hall of Fame tells the story of the U.S. cooperative community through the lives and accomplishments of extraordinary individuals. Induction to the Cooperative Hall of Fame is reserved for those who have made genuinely heroic contributions to the cooperative community,” said Gasper Kovach, Jr., Board Chair of the Cooperative Development Foundation (CDF) which administers the Hall of Fame.
