Jan Cook exemplified quieter kind of giving
If ever you are in need of a meditation on how to treat people well, I’d recommend opening the pages of Homer’s Odyssey.
If you look past the surface of the story — an adventure of a soldier-king trying to get home after the Trojan War — you’ll find a tale that examines how we ought to treat each other. Often, the most heroic people in the tale are those who help those in need and treat people with respect. The villains are those who don’t — and sometimes get turned into literal swine for their bad behaviour.
Homer suggests a simple ethical obligation between people that can be summed up as “Beware of who you turn from your door, for one day it may be you who survives on the charity of strangers.”
Consider, for a moment, how much better our community might be if we collectively adopted that attitude and simply help people because they are in need with the knowledge that, should the dice roll against us at some point, there will be someone to help us.
It’s hard these days to get that kind of point across. In a culture of superficial appearances, selfies and omnipresent branding, that kind of quiet humanism of people helping people can be difficult to find. Difficult, but not impossible. This morning, the Niagara community will mourn the loss of Jan Cook, a local philanthropist who died last week after a short battle with cancer. More than most, he exemplified the kind, charitable attitude Homer wrote about.
He was very well known in business circles as the owner of Credit Bureau Services Canada. And if you were plugged into that crowd, you also knew him be a key figure behind a host of important charity drives, including acting as the cochairman of Niagara Health System’s It’s Our Time campaign that raised $40 million. He also helped raised millions for Alzheimer Society of Niagara Region, Community Care, Gillian’s Place, the sexual assault centre and several others.
His charitable work was like the proverbial ripples caused by a stone thrown in a pond. Just consider the thousands of people — from the sick to the abused to the hungry — these organizations help every year and you’ll get a sense of the scope of Cook’s influence.
Still, unless you moved in particular circles you might not know of him. There is no grand building named after him. No Jan Cook Centre. No Credit Bureau Services Canada hospital wing. Perhaps in the future there may be, but to my knowledge he never wanted one. The fact is, Cook did what he did, not for the name recognition, but to help make his community better. He was in a position to help, so he did.
This is not to say other philanthropists and companies who insist their names and brands get splashed over everything they donate to are giving for the wrong reasons. They aren’t. They just expect to be recognized for their contributions. For better or for worse, that mix of charity and branding is how we do things these days.
Cook exemplified a quieter kind of giving, and there is precious nobility in that. He didn’t expect or ask for accolades. (Though he did receive some, including the 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award at the Niagara Entrepreneur of the Year Awards.) He just did what he could. It’s like his son Adam told The Standard last week: “Dad’s greatest accomplishments are all the little things he did for people that no one knows about.”
This is not to say Cook would not stand up and be counted when it really mattered. Last year he wrote an editorial for this paper supporting his daughter and the entire Niagara homosexual community when gay marriage came under fire from a local politician.
I cannot stress enough how impressed I was by Cook’s stand. At a time when the political community was content to stay silent, Cook made a powerful defence of the rights of his fellow citizens. I still hear from readers who were buoyed that someone of Cook’s standing in the community stood up for them when so few others would.
I only knew Cook professionally, so I am left to assess him by his impact on St. Catharines and Niagara. And on that score, he was one of those few people who left his community in better shape than the condition he found it in. And we should all strive to life up to that example.