Rounding up to give back
SVEC membership comes with many benefits. In addition to receiving safe, affordable and reliable power, our consumer-members share in the ownership of the cooperative, and they get a portion of their investment returned to them in the form of capital credits. They can make their voice heard by electing trustees to represent them and by talking with the people who run their cooperative at events like the annual meeting.
But as important as all of those benefits are, they would count for very little if members didn’t know their cooperative was invested in the local community. At SVEC, we are committed to making our community a better place to live, both in the service we provide and in finding new ways to give back.
Last year, we launched Operation Round Up® as the latest way for SVEC members to support our community. Each month, participating members’ bills were rounded up to the next dollar and the difference set aside for local schools. While each individual member’s monthly donation averaged just 49 cents, we raised more than $100,000.
With that money, SVEC’s Operation Round Up® Foundation approved 224 grants in the four counties we serve. Those grants helped to provide much-needed resources, such as books, lab equipment and subscriptions to online learning resources at public and accredited private and independent schools throughout the Suwannee Valley. And all of that in just the program’s first year! I am extremely impressed by and thankful for the generosity of our members.
You can read more about the ways local teachers put Operation Round Up® grants to use in this month’s newsletter, as well as the impact those new materials have already had in the classroom. It’s just one more way SVEC is proud to support our students as they grow into the future leaders of this community.
SVEC also is excited to sponsor and participate in many events that support and raise funds for local non-profit organizations which provide important services. You can read about some of the ones coming up soon on the last page of this newsletter.
We hope that if you see us at an event, you’ll take a minute or two and say hello.
These are just a couple of the ways SVEC works to give back to the community that created us. We were built by and operate for the people who call the Suwannee Valley home, so we will never take it for granted. This is our community, and it is a privilege to serve it each and every day.