Despite rising expenses due to USAID cuts, The Bill Cook Foundation remains focused on its mission
Some people prefer quiet, easy living. Bill Cook ’66 does not. That’s why he founded an international aid foundation when he was in his seventies.
An Indianapolis native, Cook graduated from Wabash in 1966 before heading to Cornell University and earning his master’s degree and PhD in medieval history. Professionally, Cook spent over forty years as a college professor. Most of that time was spent at the State University of New York (SUNY) in Geneseo, New York, but he also returned to his alma mater to fill a position in Wabash’s religion department for two years after legendary professor Bill Placher ’70 died in 2008. Cook is also the foremost scholar on Saint Francis of Assisi.
Cook is also an accomplished philanthropist and public servant. He served on numerous boards and committees at SUNY, led immersion trips for Wabash students and alumni, stood for election to Congress in New York, wrote a weekly newspaper column for over a decade and has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Covenant House, an organization that supports homeless youth. On top of it all, Cook founded the Bill Cook Foundation in 2015, a group that helps some of the poorest children in the world gain access to the best education possible.
“The foundation is really just the latest manifestation of Bill’s long history and commitment to making the world a better place,” said Professor of Classics Jeremy Hartnett ’96, a close friend of Cook’s for decades. “Bill has always been somebody who lived out his faith without talking a lot about his faith and who targeted education and taking care of people who have had a rough time of it.”
The Bill Cook Foundation seeks to operate with as little overhead as possible and works directly with programs and children in need. Whereas larger philanthropic organizations like the Gates Foundation or the Rockefeller Foundation approach solutions to poverty at the system-level, Cook’s foundation seeks out people in some of the world’s poorest areas whose immediate needs are greatest — places where a little money goes a long way.
So far, the Bill Cook Foundation supports people in over twenty countries across the globe. These projects include a high school for teenagers in South Sudan — many of whom have at one point in time been displaced by violence in the region — named Bill Cook High School, in honor of the man who helped fund it. The Foundation aids women who were forced to be child brides in Zimbabwe, offering them childcare and job-skills training, established a jungle medical school in Southeast Asia, founded the first and only high school for deaf teenagers in Equatorial Guinea and completely funds a program of Wabash’s Global Health Initiative that partners with Corazones Excepcionales in Peru to educate children with Down Syndrome. Corazones Excepcionales directly serves around thirty kids, and Cook’s foundation pays for them all, about $20,000 each year. 30 children may not seem like a big impact, but it’s an impact that reverberates.
“That’s pretty cheap, right?” said Cook. “But the people who benefit are far, far beyond just the kids — it’s the parents, the neighbors and the larger community. It also takes some of the stigma away. A lot of these kids had never been out of the house before our program, essentially, so nobody knew there were that many Down syndrome kids around.”
Much of Cook’s philosophy stems from his Christian faith and study of Saint Francis, who spent much of his time with the poor, often impoverished himself. For Cook, joining people in their experience of life is often crucial to loving them to the fullest extent of their humanity. He referenced a story that depicts Francis gingerly dropping money in a leprous beggar’s hand so as not to get too close, but after reflecting on his choice to distance himself, sought out another leper, embraced him and gave him money. After that, Francis recounted, it was easy to leave the world — meaning, after that, it’s easy to adopt the values of God rather than the values of humans.
“It’s not about money,” said Cook. “It’s not about my picture in the paper. It’s not about any of that. It’s simply for love. To me, that’s what’s important. It’s ‘this person,’ not ‘this leper.’ Making that move, in most cases, requires being on the ground with people; not reading about it, not studying it, maybe not even praying over it. You really need to experience it.”
Now 81 years old, he’s still indefatigably fueled by a passion for those on the margins, traveling the world to visit his foundation’s projects and spend time with the children he supports with his work. Over the past decade, the Bill Cook Foundation has given away around $4 million. His radical motivation to meet the needs of the world’s most impoverished citizens burns on.
“He’s mission-driven,” said Hartnett. “In part, he just enjoys the challenge of it. But I still remember him telling me one time when I was growing up, ‘You should not let it slip past you how incredibly lucky you are to be born where you are, with loving parents, with safety, with food, with education, et cetera.’ There’s a part of him that, when he sees injustice, he deeply wants to tamp it out. It’s also impossible for me to imagine him sitting still. He burns bright and loves collecting stories and doing his little bit to improve things.”
Cook’s work is especially valuable now. In February, the Trump administration announced it would cut more than 90% of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) foreign contracts, eliminating $60 billion in aid to marginalized people around the globe. Experts predict the cuts in aid — which funded a multitude of ventures in global health, poverty alleviation and education, among other philanthropic investments — will hurt everyone because of the inevitable spike in untreated health problems and downstream economic impacts of a less-educated global economy, but especially the most disadvantaged, the very people the Bill Cook Foundation serves. The Foundation is already feeling effects from the cuts.
“When we built a school and hired the teachers, USAID provided the food and the teacher salaries,” said Cook. “Without that additional expense, we could go and build another school. Once word got out [about USAID’s dismantling], teachers basically came and said, ‘We’re going to quit unless you can guarantee we’ll have our salary. We’ve got to find jobs somewhere else.’ We ended up sending about $25,000 to support some teachers right away. I also just sent $10,000 to schools in Kenya for food. We don’t usually have to pay for food, so it works on a number of different levels. It’s not just the teachers or the building, and it’s not just the food. It’s all of the above.”
Cook is grateful that his donors, whom he crisscrosses the country to meet with and ask for donations when he’s not meeting with the children their money supports, have been able to meet the increased needs thus far, but he worries about the direction the USAID cuts indicate the country is heading.
“I believe that the democratization of the world, with all the attendant freedoms, is slow and painful — two steps forward, one step back,” said Cook. “I think inevitably, we’re going to win out, but I’m not as confident now as I was even a couple years ago. You can’t lean back and assume that’s the way the world’s going to evolve. You’ve got to take action.”
Cook and his foundation have chosen to take action in the exploited and diminished areas of the world. Relative to the massive disease of poverty in the areas he works, Cook’s efforts could be viewed as meager, only a miniscule dent in the grand scheme of inequality and sorrow. But that view would undersell the literally life-changing contributions his foundation has made to thousands of people who now look forward to slightly brighter futures. That, and Cook is playing the long game, making his impact on one community at a time.
“Ultimately, I’m in the seed-planting business,” said Cook.
“Bill’s message is perennially important,” said Hartnett. “It’s that when you see a problem, an injustice in the world, you can attack it with ferocity and try to make it better. Bill’s inspirational in that way.”