Cook is Citizen of the Year

The 2025 Fairbury Citizen of the Year is Kathy Cook.

GFWC IL Fairbury Woman’s Club made the announcement this week. The club has been honoring outstanding volunteers in the community since 1987.

Kathy was born in Fairbury and grew up in Sibley. She attended Western Illinois University obtaining her Bachelor of Education degree.  She started volunteering in high school by teaching Sunday School.  1971 started her teaching career teaching 6^th, 1^st and 3^rd grades throughout her career. She retired from teaching in 2004 after a 33 year career. In 2006 her volunteering increased by working, to date, 19 years in Fairbury Community Food Pantry. This job includes keeping inventory, organizing the food drives, ordering food for weekly distributions, and once a year in town collection which includes putting up fliers announcing drive, announcing where and when to put your donations out and lining up volunteers to collect food. In addition to weekly food bank once a month an evening food bank is opened up for anyone not able to make Thursday food bank. Members of different churches and organizations volunteer to work this food bank.

Kathy is on the board of the Community Welfare Clearing House. This group provides assistance to residents which helps with rent and utilities. Kathy help put fliers up around town at police station, city hall, food pantry and other accessible places so those in need know how to seek aide.

Kathy has been a bloodmobile volunteer for over a year. She works registration, sends power red reminders each month through the mail, compiles all information from the blood drive for newspaper articles to be written up and submitted for publication.

Kathy is very active at her church. She assists with children’s church by elaborating on minister’s story with a craft or activity with the children.  She calls church members for workers at funeral dinners and works the funeral dinners. She talks to the family and gets an idea of how many to feed and orders the food for the funeral dinner and she works the funeral dinner as well.  She volunteers working on a loom project once a week. They are making mats from plastic bags for Midwest Distribution to be distributed to people in need for sleeping to keep them off the elements.  Kathy helps with Pancake & Sausage by serving the guest and she also works Bake Sale during Pancake & Sausage to benefit missions and projects for the church.

With family or friends if they need a ride to a doctor’s appointment, hair dresser or need to get groceries, Kathy is happy to help.

An open house will be held in Kathy’s honor on Sunday, October 26 at 2 p.m. at the United Methodist Church in Fairbury, IL.  Please plan to come join in celebrating Kathy and all her volunteer work.