Clackamas CC President Runs to Raise Awareness

Photo by Leo Fontneau

On the morning of Aug. 4, Clackamas Community College President Tim Cook spoke at Mt. Hood Community College as a part of his running tour of all of Oregon’s 17 community colleges to increase awareness and raise funds to support student basic needs.

The event was held in the Main Mall and breakfast was provided to attendees.

Cook said that he had been concerned about student basic needs for a number of years and had grown frustrated that “people didn’t seem to be taking it seriously or really understand what a serious matter it was.”

He said that when thinking about what action he could take to bring attention to the struggles of students he asked himself, “What can I do, actually, that’s gonna be crazy enough to get people’s attention?”

So he decided to run a route that would take him to every community college in the state.

Cook told me that he was inspired by a Clatsop Community College instructor, Fernando Rojas, who in 2021 biked to every community college in the state to raise funds to support students.

As of Cook’s stop at MHCC his running campaign had raised more than $116,000 to support student basic needs (the campaign ended Aug. 30 with more than $177,000 raised), but that it was only a Band-Aid for the problems he was trying to address.

He said he hoped after he had finished his lengthy run that ways would be found “to really support our students so we don’t have students living out of their cars” or making difficult choices between basic necessities like electricity and food, and paying tuition. He said that lasting change needed to be made to address those problems.

After he left MHCC’s breakfast reception, Cook was off to run for a few more days to reach Columbia George Community College in The Dalles, covering the last leg of his route.