Education Bachelor of Science in journalism, University of New Mexico (1994)
Hometown Evansville
Resume President, Junior Achievement of Southwestern Indiana (November 2025-present); executive director, Ark Crisis Children’s Center (2011-25); director of development, St. Vincent Early Learning Center (2009-11); morning and midday anchor, WEHT-TV (1998-2009)
Family Husband, Seth; son Lucas Cooley, 25; daughter Livia Cooley, 23
Angie Richards Cheek is helming a different nonprofit agency — but children still are her mission. After more than 10 years guiding the Ark Crisis Children’s Center, which assists children during times of high stress, Cheek joined Junior Achievement of Southwestern Indiana in time to help break ground on its Discovery Center, a 25,000-square-foot East Side facility for hands-on learning. “The opportunity was incredible,” Cheek says of her new role leading JA’s 15-county service area. “This is the right time to join this amazing organization, with the launching of our Discovery Center, a committed board of directors, and great team. It was just the perfect time to have a new challenge in my career at a place that is ready for the next chapter.”
For decades, your work has focused on children. What is one of the toughest challenges you’ve seen facing children today?
Always being connected to a digital world. While there are many positives to having information, entertainment, and communication at your fingertips at any time, it also puts pressure on children to be constantly connected, and may expose kids to influences and information they might not be developmentally prepared to handle.
What is the biggest boost children can get that sets them up for future success?
Having strong relationships. That is where children learn to love and trust, how to develop emotional intelligence, empathy, and healthy communication skills. Those critical skills provide a strong foundation for all future learning and success.
Describe one challenge of running a nonprofit right now.
It all comes down to the relationships that have been built and the relationships you can build from, not only with your staff but with your board of directors, with the constituents, the people who you serve, and the people who make that work possible — the funders. It’s critical to the success of any organization, but it’s also the most important piece to learn and sometimes the hardest piece.
How will the new Discovery Center enhance Junior Achievement’s mission promoting entrepreneurship and work readiness?
Pretty much everything we do is school-based. That’s the standard JA model: bring people in and teach these amazing courses to young people to give them inspiration. But this Discovery Center is going to completely change that. Not only will we be in schools, the culmination of what they’ve learned will end up in the Discovery Center. They will get to take on jobs, they will have budgeting, they will be able to figure out how the world works through simulation. Do I want a brand new car? Do I want a new house? Do I have a dog? Do I have to pay health insurance? How am I going to make all of this work with this job? That helps spark the idea of, what do I really want to do? Is this achievable with the goals you have, or do you need to scale back your goals or dream of something else?
How is that investment expected to pay off?
Educators, students, families, staff, and funders and corporations — the investment they’re making now in the Discovery Center is truly an investment in young people growing and becoming their future employees, their future CEOs. … With the Discovery Center, we will be able to bring in young people from the Owensboro-Henderson region who aren’t in our footprint. They don’t have a Discovery Center, and we want to give everyone we can this opportunity.
