By David Bailey, General Manager
Each year, your cooperative is proud to sponsor our youth leadership programs. These trips take local students to Montgomery to visit various legislative and historical sites, before selecting 2 of those students to visit Washington, D.C.
For my part, it feels like I’m hearing all kinds of negativity about the youth of today. Just recently, I read a story about students at a law school who heckled and walked out on a federal judge because they didn’t agree with him. Stories like that can tarnish our view of today’s young people, but I can tell you that the students we see in our programs are some pretty special individuals.
Still, you might be wondering why an electric cooperative is invested in a youth program like this. It comes back to the seven core principles that guide all cooperatives, starting with our commitment to provide education, training and information to our members.
As a cooperative, we want to help the people we serve understand the business we’re in. But it’s more than that. We also want to help our young people better understand their community and where it fits in on both the state and national levels. That understanding will make them more engaged citizens in our community as they grow older.
In my years here, we’ve been fortunate to have had outstanding young people represent our community and this cooperative year after year. And as proud parents and grandparents, we always want to see those students find great opportunities in their local community.
Which brings me to another cooperative principle: concern for community. If it is a young person’s dream to chase an opportunity far from home, of course we support that. But we also want them to have the chance to go to law school, medical school or a great trade school without moving away from their family, if that’s what they want.
That’s why South Alabama Electric Cooperative is always working to bolster our community by supporting economic development programs that encourage new businesses, relocated businesses and growing businesses right here in our service area.
But for all those efforts, we know that a cooperative can never achieve those goals on its own, nor can it raise young people of the quality we are seeing every day. An independent third party selects the candidates for the Youth Tour each year, and I can tell you the judges always have a very tough time deciding which students to recommend to the cooperative to sponsor.
That tells me the parents, grandparents, teachers, coaches and everyone else helping to raise our young people are doing an excellent job. So, I’d like to take a moment to thank everyone out there who plays a role in shaping the lives of our young citizens. Ultimately, we just want to be a small part of their upbringing and help them learn about some of the opportunities available to them.
I tend to think of it like a church. If your church is not bringing in young people and teaching them how to serve the church and God, then that church will not survive for long. Let’s face it, none of us will be around forever.
In the same way, we don’t want to lose our communities because we didn’t prepare our youth for the future. When they grow up and raise their own families, we want them to be valuable and wise citizens in this community. That’s why we do this.
I’m not sure the students who walked out on that federal judge showed that kind of wisdom. After all, they are law students and the speaker in question was a federal judge. When I was young, I was always taught not to burn bridges. Maybe that’s a lesson they should try to learn. Until next month, stay safe.