Raymond Plank and fellows give their perspective on the benefits of the Fund For Teachers grants.

Raymond Plank is Chairman of the Board of Apache Corporation, which he founded in 1954.

Following his World War II military service, Plank returned to his hometown of Minneapolis and with two partners formed an accounting, tax and small business advisory service. Through this enterprise, he became familiar with the types of investments then being offered in oil and gas exploration and production. Recognizing that investors' interests in this field could be better served through a different concept, Plank formed Apache Corporation. Apache offered its first oil and gas investment program in 1956. Under Plank's leadership, Apache has evolved from a company which raised investor funds for drilling into an international oil and gas exploration and production corporation which funds its drilling with internally generated cash flow.

Under Plank's leadership, Apache has grown to be one of the nation's largest independent oil and gas exploration and production companies. Today, Apache has assets of $15.5 billion and proved reserves of more than 1.9 billion barrels of oil equivalent.

Plank graduated from Yale University in 1944 with a bachelor of arts degree. He served with the U.S. Army Air Corps as a bomber pilot in the South Pacific theater of operations during World War II.

Plank has been consistently active in civic, educational and business affairs. He founded the Fund for Teachers, which provides summer travel and enrichment grants to kindergarten through 12th grade teachers. He chairs the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming and is on the board of trustees of the Washington, D.C. based Committee for Economic Development. He served as chairman of the Wyoming Futures Project and co-chairman of Minnesota Wellspring, was a founding member of Freedom Lift and Friends of Mesa Verde, and a member of the Denver Art Museum board of trustees. Plank has been a trustee of Carleton College where Apache established the Raymond Plank Chair in Incentive Economics, and is past chairman of the University of Minnesota Foundation. He was a founding member of Stakeholders in America and the American Energy Assurance Council.