Photo by Cary Jenkins
Every so often, a Westminster alum is so inspiring, others sit up and take notice. In the case of Jason Chacko, Class of 2006, The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette did just that in a recent inspiring feature that highlights the day-to-day life of the Little Rock resident.
Take a few moments to read Jason’s story, reflecting on how his Westminster education helped boost his confidence, gave him a sense of community, and, ultimately, created a framework of lifelong learning that led him to be a “leader of character,” whose “life of success, significance and service” is beautifully illustrated in this article and outlined in the College’s mission statement.
And while we’re on the subject, be sure to read about and appreciate what goes into the superior liberal arts education that Jason received as a Westminster student, where he received a degree in biology and was a member of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity.
Congratulations, Jason!
The following article by Features Reporter Sean Clancy was published in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on June 8, 2025. It is reprinted by permission. All photos are by Arkansas Democrat-Gazette photographer Cary Jenkins.
Jason George K. Chacko
High Profile: As a first-generation American, Jason Chacko exemplifies the Rotary motto ‘Service Above Self.’
And as outgoing president of Rotary Club 99, he is living the American dream.
By Sean Clancy
For most of the past year, Jason Chacko has served as president of the Little Rock Rotary Club. His tenure at the head of Club 99, as it is affectionately known, comes to a close June 30.
Looking back, he breaks down his presidency in stages.
“It went from bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, to deer-in-the-headlights. Right now I’m in the regret phase. There’s not enough time to finish everything I wanted to do. I think the final stage is acceptance and looking forward to the light at the end of the tunnel.”
Chacko, 41, has been a member of the Little Rock club since 2015. Chartered in 1914, it was the 99th Rotary Club and is the oldest civic club in the state. With about 350 members, it is also Arkansas’ largest Rotary Club. Chacko is its second-youngest president and the first person of color to hold the office.
Karen Fetzer, executive director of Club 99, says that Chacko “has exemplified the Rotary motto ‘Service Above Self’ throughout his tenure leading Club 99. With steadfast kindness, humility and a deep commitment to community service, he has guided the club through a year marked by meaningful impact and renewed civic engagement.”
Over the past year, Fetzer says, Club 99 members have “contributed more than 1,100 volunteer hours to a variety of local organizations and causes. His servant-hearted approach has not only strengthened the club internally but also reinforced Rotary’s mission of service across the Little Rock community.”
IMMIGRANT STORY
It’s a sunny Tuesday afternoon in May and Chacko is in his bright, neat office at the Pinnacle Mountain Group at Morgan Stanley in west Little Rock, where he is first vice president and financial adviser. He has just returned from the weekly Rotary lunch meeting at the Clinton Presidential Center, where the speaker was Summer DeProw, chancellor at the University of Arkansas Pulaski Technical College.
With hosting duties and networking, the lunches keep Chacko busy. He often doesn’t have time to enjoy the meal catered by Table 42.
“At the beginning of the year, I would make myself a plate and not eat it,” he says with a chuckle. “So they started boxing it up for me. It was really thoughtful.”
Each Rotary president selects a theme. Chacko, in a nod to Rotary International’s impact, chose “global hearts, local hands” and uses his time at each luncheon to highlight a Rotary Club from somewhere else in the world.
“Rotary can be successful because it’s a multinational organization made up of people trying to make their communities better,” he says.
Chacko’s parents, Deena and Joe Chacko, grew up a half-hour from each other in Kerala, a state on the coast of southwest India.
In keeping with Indian tradition, Joe and Deena’s marriage was arranged, and they wed in 1976. Shortly after, they moved to Little Rock, where Deena, a nurse who had worked in England, had been recruited to work at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. She also continued her education, earning a nurse practitioner’s degree and a master’s degree.
“My mom is hyper-intelligent,” Chacko says. “She is very, very well educated.”
Joe was also no slouch in the classroom, earning degrees from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and UA Fayetteville. He eventually became chief financial officer at United Way, a position he held for 16 years before taking a job as a financial adviser at Morgan Stanley.
Joe belonged to Rotary clubs in North Little Rock and west Little Rock. Chacko made his first Rotary appearance as a guest speaker at his dad’s club when he was 12, after winning a church speech contest.
Along with work and school, Joe and Deena were busy raising Jason and his younger brother, Jeff, who is a Little Rock pediatrician. They were also active members of Little Rock’s Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church.
“They came here with $8.26 in cash and the promise of a job … and built a successful life for themselves,” Chacko says.
KNOWLEDGE IS POWER
Chacko remembers his mother working nights and his dad going to school during the day.
“Mom and Dad told us from an early age that our inheritance was our education,” he says.
He attended private schools — Our Lady of Good Counsel, Christ Lutheran School and Little Rock Catholic High School for Boys — and was a stellar student. By third grade he was taking fifth-grade math classes and eighth-grade English classes. But all that jumping ahead had an impact beyond textbooks.
“I was 8 years old and I was among eighth graders,” he says. “I didn’t know how to interact.”
His time at Catholic, though, “was incredible. It taught me how to learn.”
Chacko, Class of 2002, has remained involved with the school and is the incoming president of its foundation/alumni association.
Steve Straessle is the head of school at Catholic High and Chacko’s former history teacher.
“The Catholic High mantra has always been that the school is designed to help parents build their sons into good husbands, good fathers and good leaders in the community,” says Straessle, a Democrat-Gazette columnist and Rotary member. “If there is ever a person who embodies that mantra, it’s Jason Chacko. Any organization that he is part of, he goes all-in. That’s evident in Rotary and in our foundation board.”
Chacko received a full-ride scholarship to Westminster College, a small liberal arts school in Fulton, Mo. He describes himself as “quiet” during high school and says he saw college as an opportunity to work on becoming more outgoing.
“At the end of four years, I knew everybody at Westminster and everybody knew the Chacko name,” he says, before adding with a chuckle: “It may be because I was a 6-foot Indian in central Missouri.”
He’d always thought of himself as an introvert, but realized during the pandemic when he was working from home that he needed interaction with others.
“I get energy from being around people. I need to be around people to learn. Everybody knows more about something than I do. It’s my job to find out what that is and try to learn from them.”
CAREER OPPORTUNITIES
Never one to waste time, Chacko graduated in four years with a degree in biology and minors in business, allied health services, chemistry and physics. He returned to Little Rock and spent three years in medical school at UAMS with a plan to be a trauma surgeon.
Witnessing his mom’s career in medicine made an impact.
“I’d wanted to be a doctor since I was 9 years old,” he says. “I grew up seeing her and I wanted to do that; the good days, the bad days. She had great relationships with her patients. She had really good job satisfaction. I was like, I want that.”
There was a moment, though, that caused him to reconsider his career path. It was Dec. 12, 2008, and Chacko was between his second and third years of medical school. He was working in the emergency room at UAMS when a 72-year-old man who had been robbed and beaten by two teenagers was brought in. The man died of his injuries, Chacko says.
“I remember sitting there at 4 o’clock in the morning and staring at this …” he pauses for several seconds, “nonsensical injury. Two teenagers didn’t need to destroy this man to take his money. I didn’t understand. Sitting there, I just thought, I can’t do this for another 50 years.”
His business classes came easily to him during college, so when it became obvious that he wasn’t going to pursue medicine, that seemed like a logical alternative.
His father had moved from United Way to Morgan Stanley, where he worked for 24 years before retiring in 2023. Chacko joined on in 2009.
“Dad was here, and he handled it the right way,” Chacko says. “He got me an interview with his boss, John Terry, who was the branch manager at the time. Dad told me, ‘I got you here now you have to survive.’”
Chacko spent three years in the rigorous Morgan Stanley training program. Nationally his class had 108 people and 14 graduated, he says.
“It’s a very difficult business. I say it’s three jobs in one. You are a money manager, you have to find new clients and you are also doing client management.”
Despite the pressure, he calls it “the best job in the world. I get paid to make friends. You get to know each other, you build trust and you do everything you can to make their dreams come to life.”
Terry, now a market executive at Morgan Stanley who manages offices in Arkansas, Alabama and the Florida panhandle, hired Chacko.
“He was an impressive young guy,” Terry says. “We hit it off from the very beginning and you could tell he was going to be a natural in our business.”
That Chacko is so dedicated to helping others came as no surprise, Terry says.
“He got it through DNA. His dad was so involved with the United Way, and I think Jason has always been drawn to the concept of giving back. Jason has always had a penchant for two things, helping others and bringing leadership to that. If you have a passion for what the organization is trying to do to better the community and you can bring your leadership ability to that, it really sets an example for others.”
FAMILY MATTERS
Chacko met his wife, Kristin, when they were in college. She attended William Woods University, the sister school to Westminster, on a volleyball scholarship. They went their separate ways after school, then reconnected nine years later. Kristin, a native of northern California, was working for Google X in San Francisco, and Chacko traveled there for a wedding.
“I texted her because she was the only person I knew in that time zone,” he says with a laugh. “We grabbed coffee the next day and started dating from there.”
They have been married for eight years and have two boys, Jude, 6, and Lee, 4. The couple also both come from impressive family trees. Kristin’s roots go back to the Mayflower, and Chacko’s family can trace its ancestry more than 40 generations back to one of the four original Brahmin Hindu priests baptized into the Christian faith by St. Thomas in south India in 57 AD.
Chacko and Kristin, who works remotely for Home Depot’s corporate office, took their sons to India to be baptized in the same Indian Orthodox church that his family attended.
“They are the eighth generation of our family to be baptized in that church,” he says.
Along with family responsibilities and his career, Chacko is a tireless volunteer. Besides his commitments to Rotary and the Catholic High foundation, he serves on the boards of Camp Aldersgate, the CARTI Hospital Foundation and Economic Arkansas.
His relationship with Camp Aldersgate, which serves individuals with special needs, dates back to when he was a high school volunteer there.
Sonya Murphy is the executive director of Camp Aldersgate and a former Club 99 president.
“Jason is an incredible human,” she says. “He has very high expectations, especially for himself. He’s intelligent, but his kindness really outshines everything else. He has a lot of swerve and verve and is uniquely Jason.”
Chacko joined the Camp Aldersgate board in 2020.
“When the pandemic arose, we never shuttered,” Murphy says. “But with our medically fragile population, we did virtual programming. Jason rolled up his sleeves and led a task force that looked into re-engaging alumni like himself and helped us start our alumni program for counselors and volunteers and even campers.”
NOT DROPPING THE BALL
Leading Club 99 is a serious commitment. It’s no wonder that presidents are chosen three years out to give them time to learn ropes and take advice from their predecessors and executive director Fetzer.
Now Chacko is fast approaching that final stage of his presidency, the one that involves acceptance. He’s probably also looking forward to actually being able to eat during the monthly Club 99 lunches.
He acknowledges that it took a lot of help from friends and family to get to this point.
“I’ve learned my limits this year, as far as what I can do and what I can do effectively,” he says with yet another hearty chuckle. “It’s amazing the support network I have. My wife has been great … my team (at Morgan Stanley) is amazing.”
He also mentions his mother and father, who are doting grandparents now.
They live three minutes from him in the same house where he grew up; his brother lives nearby as well. While Chacko recalls seeing his own grandparents in India just a handful of times, his sons can spend the night with his parents and sleep in his old room.
“It’s an American dream-type story,” he says. “They came here with not a lot and they built a life for themselves. Now they’ve retired and can be full-time grandparents.
“As a first-generation American, that is 100% a chip on my shoulder. I can’t drop the ball. If they were able to do what they did, starting off on the bottom rung, where do I need to go from where I started? That’s a motivator for life. To honor the legacy of my parents.”
Sarah Rummel Backer is the Director of Media Relations and Senior Writer at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. A proud Westminster graduate, Sarah has more than 20 years of experience in marketing and strategic communications in the areas of higher education, medicine, agriculture, and the private business sector.
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