Grassroots effort to engage young consumer-members now a year-round activity.
By Derrill Holly

The 2008 NRECA Youth Tour is still more than five months away, but co-op personnel across the country are already working to assemble their state’s delegations.

“We start planning our Youth Tour in October, eight months before we take the students to Washington,” said Shana Holsteen, director of communications for the Kansas Electric Cooperatives.

Over the winter months, local co-op coordinators recruit county officials, chamber of commerce officers and others to serve on the delegate selection committees. Co-op officials also contact high school guidance counselors, English and social studies teachers and youth group coordinators who encourage students to look into the program.

 “The best promoters for the trip are the kids themselves,” said Lynn Moore, director of member relations and development at the Indiana Statewide Association of Rural Electric Cooperatives.

Since 2004, Youth Tour alumni have created Web sites offering their views on the program, and continue to use social networking sites such as MySpace® and Facebook® to reach out to both friends and future participants.

“I met a lot of people who I still communicate with through the program,” said Kirk M. Shoemaker, 20, who represented Adams Electric Cooperative, Gettysburg, Pa., on the 2005 tour.

Former participants stress that the program is about far more than fun, museum tours and monuments, because it exposed them to a broader view of the world. It remains a favorite of co-op directors, in part, because students meet their congressional representatives as community stakeholders.

“I learned I really could make a difference,” said Loretta Pfannes, 23, a 2002 delegate for Polk-Burnett Electric Cooperative, Centuria, Wis., who also served on the Youth Leadership Council.

“One of the cooperative principles is commitment to the community,” said Dennis Cannon, vice president of member and public relations for the Kentucky Association of Electric Cooperatives, Inc. “The Washington Youth Tour is the embodiment of that.”

And more than 50 years after Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson urged co-ops to send their young people to Washington at the 1957 NRECA annual meeting, the program continues to grow.
“There were 1,319 participants in 2003, and 1,492 from 45 states last year,” said Stephen F. Uram, a grassroots advocacy representative in NRECA’s Government Relations Department.

“We’ll probably have more than 1,500 students in Washington this summer,” he said.

Since 1957, the program has been a key initiative of NRECA. Members of Congress make time in their schedules to meet with the Youth Tour delegations and answer tough questions about partisanship, climate change, education funding and other issues important to these young voters, said Uram.

“Over the years, we have put a stronger public policy focus on the program,” said Dena G. Stoner, NRECA’s vice president of government relations. “We see enormous value in providing the students the opportunity to be personally involved in the political process.”

Source: Electric Co-op Today January 18, 2008 Vol. 14, No. 2