Co-op Mission Trips Are Heartwarming. The Real Test Is How Co-ops Treat Their Own Members at Home.
North Carolina electric co-ops sent lineworkers to electrify a Guatemalan village, a powerful gesture. But the same co-ops often lock U.S. members into coal contracts and unopposed board elections, the real test of cooperative values is what happens in your own district.
Global Renewable News reports that 15 lineworkers from eight North Carolina electric cooperatives traveled 2,800 miles to bring first-time electricity to the remote Guatemalan village of El Plan Nuevo Amanecer.[1] It is a genuinely moving story: volunteers spending weeks away from home to flip the switch for families who have cooked by open flame and preserved food without refrigeration. But for anyone who follows rural electric co-ops in the United States, the dispatch raises a harder question: do those same co-ops serve their own members with the same urgency?
Rural electric cooperatives are nominally democratic institutions owned by the members they serve. In practice, many are captured utilities. Board elections routinely go uncontested, with single-digit turnout, a sign that the cooperative bargain has broken down. All-requirements contracts with generation and transmission (G&T) cooperatives can lock members into coal-fired power through 2050, blocking access to cheaper renewables. And unreturned patronage capital functions as an interest-free loan from members to management. The North Carolina co-ops that sent volunteers to Guatemala also serve hundreds of thousands of households across the state. How many of those members know their co-op’s fuel mix, their board election date, or their right to inspect the books?
The contrast is sharp. In Guatemala, the co-op volunteers brought power to a village that had none, a clear, measurable good. In the U.S., many co-ops fight member-owned solar, impose fees that mirror investor-owned utility tariffs, and keep financial records closed. The cooperative model works when members act like owners: attending annual meetings, running for the board, and asking hard questions about G&T contracts and rate design. The same lineworkers who string wire in Central America could be stringing fiber or building community solar at home, if their boards and managers were accountable to the members who elect them.
This is not an argument against international solidarity. It is an argument for consistency. If a co-op can find the resources to electrify a village abroad, it can find the resources to retire its coal contracts, cut members in on solar savings, and return capital credits on a reasonable schedule. The mechanism is the same: a board that reflects the membership, elections that are contested, and books that are open. The next time a co-op trumpets its humanitarian work, the fair question is: what have you done for your own members lately?
The path forward starts at home. Find your co-op’s annual meeting date. Look up the bylaws and the petition threshold to get on the ballot. Ask for the G&T contract and the capital-credit retirement policy. If the answers are slow or the meeting is sleepy, that is an organizing agenda. The co-op model is a promise of democratic control, but only if members claim it.