CEO’s Message: Decades in the Making

November 2025

From its earliest days, this cooperative’s mission has always been about expanding access. Back when Suwannee Valley Electric Cooperative was first incorporated in 1937, it was access to electricity.

As major cities were lighting up the night with the relatively new technology, many rural areas were getting left behind. Major power companies looked at areas like ours, where neighbors could be miles apart, and determined there was no profit to be made in running miles of line to serve only a handful of people.

So, with a helping hand from the newly passed Rural Electrification Act, rural communities took matters into their own hands. The founding leaders of SVEC went door to door — signing up their neighbors as members of the cooperative — and built an electric system they owned and operated.

Decades later, that cooperative is still providing a crucial service to our community. But in recent years, it became clear that access to electricity wasn’t the only essential service our neighbors in the Suwannee Valley needed. When the pandemic struck, school districts found themselves delivering homework packets by bus because students lacked sufficient internet access. Jobs shifted to remote work-from-home positions, and even healthcare moved to online platforms. The need for a true high-speed internet network in our area was evident.

Two years later, a small group of people met with a notepad and a vision: to build a homegrown, 100% fiber network for the Suwannee Valley. The advantages to our community were clear, from creating new opportunities in business and education to revolutionizing health care access. Additionally, the network would serve as the backbone for a SmartGrid, expanding system capabilities to enhance service and reliability for our members.

I couldn’t help seeing the parallels with our original mission more than 85 years ago. Just as we did in 1937, we would bridge the gap and make that transformation happen ourselves.

We could not be prouder of the progress everyone at SVEC and Rapid Fiber Internet has made. Crews have laid more than 2,500 miles of fiber, our service team has signed up more than 6,000 customers, and we have expanded service to 32 zones across our system, with the last 10 expected to be complete ahead of schedule next summer.

You can read more about the efforts behind that progress in this month’s newsletter. For my part, I can say that it has been inspiring to see everyone at SVEC and Rapid Fiber Internet embrace the cooperative spirit the way they have over the last few years. The job isn’t done yet. But when it is, our community will have come together to build something that will stand right alongside the achievements of those founding SVEC members.

It’s a transformative time for our cooperative, and I look forward to bringing you more updates as the Rapid Fiber Internet project nears completion. Through it all, we remain committed to bringing reliable service as your local cooperative.