Today's Electrifying News...

Our Extended Co-op Family

Tony Anderson

Do you have relatives whom you have never met or barely know?

Around the office, we often talk about the “cooperative family.” If you are a member of Cherryland Electric Cooperative (CEC), you are included as part of our family.

We also write and talk about the benefits of belonging to a cooperative, such as local control (owned by those we serve), commitment to community, profits (capital credits) returned to members, and cooperation among cooperatives.

It is these “other” members of the cooperatives family that I want to write about today. Some you may remember, and others you may not. Each plays a valuable part in our daily service to each member on the family tree that is our distribution system.

Wolverine Power Cooperative (WPC) is probably the most recognized member of our larger family. Cherryland gets all of your wholesale electricity from WPC.

Wolverine participates in the open market, working on long-term contracts, maintaining ownership in small slices of generation, and exploring all avenues for future power supply. Almost 70 cents of each dollar of revenue that Cherryland takes in goes towards wholesale power costs.

The Michigan Electric Cooperative Association (MECA) is our voice in statewide legislative issues and also produces this magazine that reaches over 34,000 CEC family members each month. We have saved countless dollars due to the diligent efforts of MECA staff in shaping state legislation for the benefit of every co-op member in Michigan.

The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association handles legislative efforts on a national scale in Washington. By pooling together employees at over 800 cooperatives nationwide, this association also administers low-cost employee benefits that help its members to compete in the labor market while controlling costs.

Touchstone Energy® is our nationwide marketing group that is charged with promoting cooperatives across the country. Member-customers and legislators need to know the difference between an electric co-op and other types of utilities. The Touchstone Energy brand name helps tie the cooperative network together on a large scale and promotes the cooperative difference.

The National Rural Utility Cooperative Finance Corporation (CFC) is a bank for electric and telephone cooperatives. Over time, cooperatives have outgrown the ability of the federal government to meet their needs. CFC was formed to supplement and sometimes entirely replace government loans (this is the case at Cherryland). CFC helps keep rates lower because it doesn’t have to make the profits of a privately held bank and can therefore charge slightly lower interest rates.

The National Information Solutions Cooperative (NISC) provides all the billing and accounting software for hundreds of cooperatives nationwide. Once again, cooperatives joined together to reduce costs through economies of scale.

While there are a few more, I think you get the idea. As the cooperative industry has grown, we have added a family of not-for-profit cooperatives to provide services that can be used by distribution systems from Alaska to Maine.

Any money made at each one of them ends up on the bottom line at cooperatives like yours. From there, your share is eventually returned to you.

It’s all about family building family to take care of family — it is simply the cooperative difference.

More Electrifying News >