Indiana’s electric cooperatives are committed to the communities they serve and are involved with philanthropic activities throughout Indiana and beyond. Your cooperative serves your community and spearheads philanthropic projects to help create a better world.
For instance, during Community Day, Indiana’s electric cooperatives work collectively to make a positive impact on our state. Each year on the second Friday of October, each of Indiana’s electric cooperatives determines a need within its service area. Then, employees work as a team to complete the project. The day provides an opportunity to focus on the good work electric cooperatives do in their communities and it also gives your cooperative a chance to provide extra value to the community it serves.
Working side-by-side, Indiana’s electric cooperatives demonstrate one of the core cooperative principles: concern for community. More than 40 unique service projects are completed in a single day every year.
Cooperatives care about their communities. That’s why they take time out of their week to serve them. Stay up to date on cooperative initiatives by being a grassroots advocate. Encourage your friends and family to sign up, too. Visit https://action.indianaec.org/ today!
Do you know of a service project that you would like your cooperative to get involved in? Contact your cooperative today!
Supporting the Ronald McDonald House for 25 years
Concern for community is a core principle of Indiana’s electric cooperatives. Electric cooperative employees and directors work in and care for the communities they serve.
One of their charitable initiatives is the Ronald McDonald House.
The Ronald McDonald House of Indiana has been providing a supportive home-away-from-home for families of seriously ill or injured children since 1982. Indiana’s electric cooperatives have been proud supporters since 1995.
Each year at the annual meeting of the cooperatives’ statewide service association, co-ops throughout the state donate much-needed supplies for the house. Throughout the last 25 years, Indiana’s electric cooperatives have donated over $200,000 to support the Ronald McDonald House’s mission.
The needs of the house may change, but our focus will always be to ensure the Indiana Ronald McDonald House can assist Hoosier families for many years to come.
Living the Principles Outside Our Borders
Paying it forward through Project Indiana
Indiana’s electric cooperatives are such strong supporters of the seven cooperative principles they’re taking their passion for these pillars of the cooperative movement and are sharing them in other parts of the world.
Through Project Indiana, Hoosiers have brought hope, in the form of electricity, to rural Guatemalan villages. Using donated materials, volunteers bring electricity to these impoverished areas for the first time.
The project was born in the summer of 2012 under the moniker Hoosiers Power the World. One of the largest international endeavors undertaken by electric cooperatives across the U.S., the first trip included 28 linemen, two cooperative executives and staff members from Indiana Electric Cooperatives, the service association of the state’s electric cooperatives. Over a four-week period, the volunteers, working in conjunction with the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association’s International Program, toiled with villagers to erect poles at the precipice of steep drop-offs, running cable through jungle gorges.
By 2015, the vision grew into Project Indiana and sustainable change — moving beyond electrifying villages to making them better places to live, enhancing the community and encouraging the development of cooperatives — just as happened 85 years ago when the electric cooperatives first brought electricity to rural Indiana.
Through Project Indiana, electric cooperatives are paying it forward, empowering global communities one village at a time. And, we know it all begins with electricity — access to better health care, fresh drinking water, expanded educational opportunities, economic development and increased public safety.
Project Indiana volunteers plan to return to the communities to provide them with other resources and services they so desperately need, and visit other parts of the country to help electrify those communities. It’s the cooperative way.