Fallen exec seeks to aid nonprofits

Four years after his name made headlines statewide, Warren Cook has something new on his plate.

The Kingfield resident is promoting a new program being spearheaded by Common Good Ventures, a nonprofit he helped create in 2000. He has donated $50,000 of his own money through the Maine Community Foundation to the program in an effort to see it succeed.

Forrest Berkley of Wayland, Mass., also has given $50,000 to Common Good Ventures through the foundation for a total grant of $100,000.

A former executive at the Sugarloaf USA ski resort in Carrabassett Valley and later at The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Cook hopes to help teach nonprofits how to network like for-profit companies. If they can learn to limit their scope, to play to their strengths and to collaborate more with other nonprofits, he said, they could more effectively serve the people they are trying to help.

“I’ve been involved with [nonprofit] work for 25 years,” Cook said Friday after cutting fresh hay in a field near his home. “I’ve come to the conclusion that no one organization is going to bring about change.”

Change is something Cook is no stranger to.

Five years after he left Sugarloaf to work at Jackson Lab, Cook resigned as president of the lab’s JAX Research Systems division after it became public that he had falsified his resume. Cook said his claim that he had been awarded the prestigious Navy Cross for his military service was a “lie” and also acknowledged that he did not earn a master’s degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst or play on the 1968 U.S. Olympic hockey team.

Despite the revelations, Cook was able to keep his seats on the board of Common Good Ventures and Maine Sea Coast Mission, a nonprofit that serves residents of coastal islands and Downeast Maine.

Cook has not received a lot of public attention since his departure from the lab. He served on Gov. John Baldacci’s transition team after Baldacci was re-elected last November. This past spring, he and former American Skiing Co. CEO Les Otten tried to buy the Sugarloaf and Sunday River ski resorts but lost out to Michigan-based Boyne USA.

Since moving back to Kingfield from Mount Desert, where he lived during his Jackson Lab years, Cook has worked with Western Maine nonprofits Mountain Counties Heritage Network and Western Mountain Alliance. He co-founded Sugarloaf Global Partners to pursue resort and development opportunities in the Far East and to try to help European technology firms crack the American market.

And he has remained closely involved with Common Good Ventures. He said Friday he has always believed in and supported community-oriented, nonprofit work, even before revelations that he had lied on his resume.

The public shame, he said, has brought about changes within himself but has not changed his approach to community affairs.

“That was an important and difficult time, but it needed to happen,” Cook said. “It made me be more honest with myself. I’m better off for having gone through it.”

Cook said that four years after the fact, he still has no simple explanation for why he claimed accomplishments he had never achieved.

“There’s no easy answers for something like that,” he said. “I wish there was. Something like that will always be with you.”