November 10, 2025

In early August, Dr. Tim Cook, the president of Clackamas Community College, victoriously jumped into the Columbia River after running to every community college in Oregon, a route that covered over 1,400 miles. The objective of his run wasn’t athletic prestige—but to secure students’ basic needs.

Dr. Cook raised over $177,000 in emergency funds for community college student basic needs support during his run.  Cook says that the one-time infusion of support doesn’t come close to the run’s potential payoff for students.

I sat down with Dr. Cook to find out what motivated him to run, what problems he sought to solve with a run that weren’t being funded otherwise, and how other colleges can replicate his strategy—without having to run 53 marathons.

What is it that inspired you to take this approach, to run so far for so long, rather than say, supporting students through traditional fundraising?

I've been thinking for several years about how to get more attention around basic needs. It goes back to The Hope Study that we'd done here in Oregon in 2019, so, you know, that really exposed some things that I'd been wondering about around houselessness and food insecurity. Getting people's attention around that or getting them to kind of really understand that this is a more serious issue was challenging. When I would talk to legislators, and when I would talk to most anybody, there was this kind of attitude of, “That's just what college is about.”

What got the running going was a couple things. I'd really been thinking for a while, like, how do I connect all 17 of our community colleges out here in Oregon? They're all over the map, kind of spread out. I thought, “Is there a way to bring them together and really make this more of a statewide effort?”

I've been an avid runner for almost 20 years, running marathons and ultra marathons. And in 2021 there was a faculty member, Fernando Rojas, from Astoria, Oregon, our Northwestern most college, who biked to all of the campuses and raised money for students. And when he came through, that's when it really clicked for me. I talked to him, and I said, “Hey, I want to chat with you at some point about your route, how you did this. I think I can run this. I think I could figure out a way to run this.”

I don't think anyone's done anything like that before.

I will say I got a little grumpy. Every year we go to the legislature and ask for funds and tell them compelling stories. We bring students. I don't want to make it sound doom and gloom, but it wasn't getting anywhere. I wasn't seeing any progress. And so I was like, “Boy, I really do need to just get out and have a larger conversation about this as opposed to the standard ‘come and state some facts and leave, and then somebody else comes in and states theirs.’

It really did require a bigger idea.

You said that things stagnated. You had already shared stories, and connected data to that narrative. Where did you hit that wall with legislators?

There’s so much noise. There’s so many priorities and so much need in general that it just felt overwhelming, in a sense that there's so many things out there that maybe are equally or more compelling. And yet, I'm still day to day, really faced with this.

I have a friend of thirty years who is a state legislator, you know. I was friends with him way before he was a legislator. He’s compassionate and works hard. He came out and crewed the run for four days with us. He and his husband came out and actually helped. I figured he was kind of already sort of somebody that was on my side, but even him, the first couple days, he was like, "I don't quite get this. I don't quite understand what we're doing, what this is about.”

By the time he left, he's said, “Oh, I understand now,” because he had a chance to talk to students. He'd had a chance to talk to other presidents in some places we'd been. And it took that for somebody who I thought would be kind of a no-brainer, who would be on it, to get him outside of his own comfort zone, and really sort of stop and pay attention to it. That was part of it.

Even good people tend to have a fatigue, “I’ve heard 15 stories today, I’m out.” But bringing people to campuses forces them outside of the legislature, outside of their comfort zone.

I think for at least community college students, the struggle is that many of our legislators maybe went straight to a four-year and maybe don’t understand their experiences. Maybe they had more of a traditional experience at 18 years old, lived on campus, were fed.

I remember somebody actually asked me, “Why, if students are hungry, why don't they just go back to their dorm and get dinner?”

And I just stopped and went, “Oh, that's actually really a perception that I need to remind people of—that some of our students are 30, they have kids, or they're working, and all these other things—they don't have a dorm.

So it’s getting folks out of that, that mindset.I think there's sort of a romanticism around those days, a certain nostalgia.  I kept thinking, “Boy, how do I how do I really help them understand that it's not like that anymore? That things are different now?

Let’s look at the core concept of your run. Where can folks who want to recreate this experiment in their own way start? What should they be thinking about when planning a similar stunt?

Yeah, I thought about that a lot because this is very much a one and done kind of a thing.

I'm not even sure it's about events themselves per se or something else than it is about people really stopping and talking about it. What I'm hearing is that this sparked, for many of them, a desire to really have an annual event. They didn’t want to do that

before. We gained a bunch of support from our from our local and our national legislators around this. And so how do we really use that information to advocate and continue to talk about it?

It's almost shorthand for talking about student basic needs insecurity, at least for us right now, to say “Let's go talk about Tim’s run across the state.” Even the governor the other day, asked me about it.

I continue to wonder about how others can kind of use this to, you know, to really springboard off and have those conversations so it doesn't just kind of kind of die out. I’m seeing glimmers.

For us at my college, we used it to create an endowment. So now we have something that I think is going to be more sustaining as we grow that and have reason to do it. But, even on my campus, where I had lots of support and lots of lots, people were very well educated about it, we’re still trying to make that case to donors and others about why this matters.

People are like, “Well, I don’t want to give to that.” They spend all that money on other flashy stuff.

Do these perception issues with donors mirror those that you find in your legislators?

Let me give you a really specific example.

We have a very generous donor who has lots of capability and has been very generous to the college for several years, but is really about “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps,” and was not a fan of specifically giving money to basic needs. He didn't see its value. He wanted to support scholarships, wants to support Career and Technical Education and the rest. But to his credit, because he believes in my vision and what we're doing here, he gave some money.

He said, “Hey when you’re out running up the coast, we’ll be at our beach house. We’d love to have you and your wife stay.”

So we spent a day with him and his wife and talked about all of this, plus he was following the entire run, and it clicked for him somewhere along the way. I thought about him because he's somebody who is what I would call a “traditional donor.” He wants to give to scholarships, to support a building or equipment or something, but doesn’t give money to students directly, because “who knows what they're going to do with that.” Other long-time donors said the same thing to me.

I explained all the ways that we vet the students, but in my head I’m thinking, “Who cares? If a student says they’re hungry or they’re going to get kicked out of their house, I want to help them.” It’s a shift in the traditional mindset about what students need.

The old way of thinking feels very parochial, like, “I’m going to tell you what you need: a scholarship for your books or something else you may already have covered despite your needing something else.”

The positive is that I think a lot of people get it, and more people are getting it.

In my 8^th year as president, our food pantry was tucked away and hidden in the back. When we remolded our student center, the students said they want it front and center. They want easy access, they want people to find it.

That’s what happened. It’s probably five times as large, and everyone knows where it’s at.

That was the shift: Let’s not shame people, let’s really address it. I think donors and philanthropists need to make that shift and realize this is our reality now.

We know what the landscape looks like nationally, but let’s focus in on your students to see how others can replicate this success: What systemic barriers do your students face to meeting their basic needs?

It’s very expensive to live here—like a lot of places—so housing is a challenge. So many of our students are on the fringe to begin with, trying to make rent or being lucky enough to live in a house and hang onto that.

We live in a pretty big geographical district so transportation is a barrier and a challenge as well. One silver lining to the pandemic is that we have many more online options now, and they can take those classes and not have to pay for travel or child care. Those are strong systemic issues for them.

The shortage became worse with more federal funding challenges. Before all this, we used to say, “Our students are a flat tire away from dropping out.” Now we have more ways to support them, but there are so many other barriers to getting them in to be supported and realize there are options for them and we can help them overcome those barriers and systemic challenges.

I can imagine myself back when I was a student thinking, “Oh college is going to be so expensive and no one is going to help me.” But your run would definitely reassure me that you must care in some way, that you must want to help.

I can’t speak for all the students, but many of our students that were tracking this run were really excited about it and quite motivated. I had students from my college and other colleges come out and run parts of it with me, and the feedback was inspiring. They would thank me for raising awareness and talking about it.

I hope that people would see that and think, “Hey, this is a place where I can come and get some help, or they’re going to take good care of me.”

 We want to make sure that students have access to college regardless, so I’m hoping they believe it.

That building of care seems so important. What is your relationship like with students?

I pride myself on being incredibly student-centered.

I usually wear a bowtie, like every day. I’m the only one on campus that wears one—so they know who I am, they recognize me. I’m out quite a bit.

I was a first-generation college student, and so I remember being nervous about questions like, “Could I handle this? Am I supposed to be here?” And I think about the people that helped me.

So my “Why?” for this work is the same as it was going way back to when I was an undergrad, making sure that everybody feels welcome and that they belong. I pride myself on the fact that we built a culture and ethos around this attitude of care and belonging. I’m really happy to see that on the opening days and weeks, students and faculty are out and connecting, helping people get what they need.

They say they came here because they felt that people cared, that they mattered. That’s probably the best thing I could hear.

We know that belonging interventions help students persist in college, and make them more likely to seek supports. Your approach is well-backed by this data.. Did you see that data beforehand, or was this an intuition of yours?

I don’t think I can say that I really knew that going in. I think this has been a maturation for me other the years, to know a way to really help people is to make them feel like they belong and can say. It wasn’t something I calculated, it was something I got into and saw that the reasons people had to leave or were challenged was around belonging.

If we’re going to have people stay, we need to create an environment where people feel like they belong, and like they matter.

I’ll give you an example. About three years ago, we had a free medical clinic that was looking for a place. They approached us and asked if we could house them at SCU. I said, “Boy, it would sure be great to have a free health clinic on campus, because we don’t have a health center.”

I got such a great response from students and the community. They thought it was really cool that we were doing that. I told people that I think the future for us is more of a social services hub, something more than a higher education institution. I think that resonates with many people. It doesn’t resonate with everyone, but I’ve been pretty clear about that moving forward that we serve our community, not just our students.

It wasn’t part of a grand vision coming in, it evolved over time and I continued to grow, and frankly, became frustrated with a lack of solutions.

And I’ll give credit to The Hope Center. Looking at the research and the data that you collect confirms these intuitions. It’s critical to have hard data to come back to. That was a real catalyst for me. It helps to show people this is real, that my intuition about the problem was correct, and that I might be able to solve it.

Now that you’ve ran this far, where do you want to go next with meeting students’ needs?

Two things: I really want to be able to offer free breakfast lunch for all of our students. I’ve been trying to figure out how to make that work, how to pay for that. I want to make sure people are being fed. I also believe it would really help our FTE and help people stay in school. If that works, but it’s the standard one. I really believe housing is such an issue locally, and I’m trying to figure out affordable housing on our campus.

More than anything, though, I believe college is an opportunity for so many people who are place-bound; either happy to be where they are or can’t leave. We’re there to provide some opportunity that they wouldn’t have otherwise.

When I think about the point of Clackamas Community College, I say, “Community is our middle name.” Every time I give a talk I say that.

My ideal vision is to be so integrated into the community that it’s hard to tell where the borders are. I think about things as basic as, you know, people want to walk their dogs here. I want them to feel welcome to do that. People should want to come here and audit a class or learn something, because we’re here anyway. But you know, when I’m thinking about where we’re going and who we’re partnering with or connecting with them, and how we can play into it long-term, this is how I guide myself.

We’ve already got a gym, a makerspace where people can use a 3D printer and a laser cutter. We have what we call an environmental learning center. It’s essentially a wooded space with creeks and stuff that we use mostly for K-12 education. We have other people coming in as well, and with the growth of that, we’re looking at other opportunities to get children on the campus. We’re constructing what we call a Challenger Center, which is basically a space simulation where people can come and play around, kids can come learn and have field trips—but also for adults who want to have an experience.

These types of spaces can serve as active spaces for seniors, for an aging population. We have a gerontology program, but we’re thinking about how we can really have more of a birth-death vision of what we do on the campus. We have early childhood, we have K-12, we have college students, and now older adults.

I really want to be one of the adults who uses the space center.

Give us a couple years and you can be.

Last question, if you could change anything instantly about college by magic, what would it be?

I’d remove the barrier of tuition and financial aid. I’d make free college work.