About Phil & Betsy Hendrickson
The naming of the Hendrickson Community Center honored Phil and Betsy Hendrickson and their extraordinary support of the broad range of academic and student life initiatives at UW-Green Bay. The impact of their involvement—through charitable gifts, wise counsel and volunteer service dating to the institution's earliest years—promises to carry forward for decades to come.
Phil and Betsy were charter members of the Founder's Association and continued to make annual gifts to enhance student scholarships and academic excellence. They were early and enthusiastic supporters of the Phuture Phoenix program, the Chancellor's Scholarship Fund, the University Education Endowment and the Phoenix Fund. They made leadership gifts toward construction of the Weidner Center for the Performing Arts and, later, its Chihuly chandelier. Most recently, Betsy agreed to serve as honorary chair of UW-Green Bay's Capital Campaign: the Hendricksons made a generous philanthropic donation to the new Kress Events Center.
In 1987 they created one of the University's first named professorships with a major gift for the Philip J. and Elizabeth B. Hendrickson Professorship for Business.
Betsy and Phil were graduates of the University of Wisconsin. They pursued graduate school and early careers on the East coast before relocating to Green Bay, where Phil accepted a position with Krueger Metal Products (now KI) and ascended to the rank of chairman and CEO.
Betsy worked for the UW's two-year branch campus in Green Bay. Years later, in the mid-1970s, her children grown, she worked in staff positions at what had become the four-year UW-Green Bay. For the Office of Educational Research, she began an important study exploring why adults do or do not return to college. Her work was instrumental to the creation of the Extended Degree and Adult Degree Programs; it also became her thesis. She completed her UW-Green Bay master's degree in Environmental Arts and Sciences in 1979.
Betsy served on founding Chancellor Edward Weidner's community advisory board, and she was a founding member of the Chancellor’s Council of Trustees. Phil served on the Founder's Association board of directors. He was a member of the UW Board of Regents and president of the Wisconsin Board of Vocational Education.
Among many community honors received for their volunteer activities was the UW-Green Bay Chancellor's Award in 1983. Betsy was also awarded the UW-Green Bay Distinguished Alumni Award in 2006 and the John P. Cofrin Humanitarian Award from the Fort Howard Paper Foundation in 1978. Phil Hendrickson was honored with the prestigious Free Enterprise Award by the Green Bay Rotary Club in 1986. Holder of an undergraduate degree in accounting from the UW, and a Harvard MBA, Phil was honored with a UW-Madison Distinguished Alumnus Award.