Singing River Electric hosted its Youth Leadership Program Cooperative University at its Lucedale office on Friday, December 10, 2021. All high schools within Singing River Electric’s service territory were invited to nominate one member of the junior class to represent the school. Student nominees were required to have a minimum 3.0 grade point average, be involved in extracurricular activities, be active in church, civic, and community activities, and receive electricity from Singing River Electric.
During Cooperative University, students were encouraged to get to know each other through networking activities, learned about the cooperative form of business, and took a closer look at how Singing River Electric provides power to its members and restores power after an outage. They also learned about SRE’s fiber internet subsidiary, Singing River Connect, and the process for bringing broadband to residents in the three pilot areas.
A legislative panel discussion driven by student questions was the highlight of the day. Secretary of State Michael Watson, and Senators Dennis DeBar, Jeremy England, and Chris Johnson spent over an hour answering the students’ questions about education, the legislative process, and the need for broadband internet. Each student also participated in a 10-minute interview moderated by a panel of out-of-town judges from electric cooperatives across the state. Based on the student interviews and participation throughout the day, William Rasberry, Gianna Pierce, and Sarah Jean Scearce were selected to attend the Youth Leadership Workshop in Jackson in March and the Youth
Tour of Washington, D.C. in June.
Singing River Electric has an 83-year heritage of providing safe, reliable and affordable electricity to our local communities where we call home. SRE serves more than 76,600 meters across 7,556 miles of power lines in seven counties in Mississippi (Jackson, George, Greene, Perry, Stone, Wayne and Harrison) and two counties in Alabama (Mobile and Washington). The electric distribution cooperative works with Cooperative Energy to provide its members a diverse mix of generation resources including five small-scale solar sites locally and a 540-acre solar site in Lamar County. For more information, follow our conversations on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.