�the magazine you hold in your hands was prepared,
printed and delivered to your doorstep. For a cost that hasn�t increased in
over 20 years, your cooperative is working hard to keep you informed about
your utility as efficiently as possible, while sharing the sense of
community that cooperatives are all about.
Perhaps surprisingly, the humble postage stamp persists
in our electronic age. Sure, most Americans� lives now involve communicating
through smartphones, emails, texts, tweets, and video chats, and who knows
what other modes we�re likely to add to our messaging menu over the next few
years. Can �holographic hellos� be far off?
Still, the stamp survives. Why? Well, perhaps because it
remains for many folks an inexpensive ticket to carry both near and far
their bills and bill payments, their anniversary and birthday cards, their
wedding and graduation invitations, and their carefully composed catch-up
notes to family and friends.
The stamp is also a symbol of a simpler time, when the
heart of a rural community was its post office, often attached to, or part
of, the local general store. And even today, in rural crossroads and
villages across Virginia, the post office is still the place to go, to
gather, to share news and views, and to collect your parcels and packages
and perhaps presents, too.
As America becomes more urbanized and its sense of
community becomes more electronic and virtual, it�s nice to remember, and to
still have vestiges of, real communities, of people sharing a sense of
place, committed to its well-being.
At 49 cents, a postage stamp remains an economical,
proven pathway to carry important messages from your home community to
places away. And, at 49 cents, we believe this magazine remains an
economical, proven pathway to deliver important information about your
electric cooperative.
As a member-consumer of a cooperative, you�re entitled to
receive information about this utility that you and your neighbors own. And
for the cost of a stamp, your cooperative is able to design, develop, and
deliver Cooperative Living magazine to your doorstep. Which begs the
question: How the heck is that possible?
The answer is as simple as the business structure of the
utility you own. A cooperative consists of people working together to
provide themselves with a product or service they�re not otherwise able to
obtain, or afford. By working together, they�re able to do both.
Electric cooperatives were formed
by rural people in the 1930s and early �40s to bring electricity to the
countryside, where the large utilities were not interested in serving. A few
years later, three small Virginia cooperatives began publishing a broadsheet
newspaper to inform their member-consumers about the cooperative, and the
wondrous uses of electricity around the farm and in the farmhouse.
Soon, other cooperatives began sending the publication to
their member-consumers too. By working together, the cost per copy was, and
remains, very affordable.
Today, Cooperative Living is the primary communications
channel for 12 electric
cooperatives across the width and breadth of the
Commonwealth, from the Cumberland Gap in the far southwestern corner, to
Chincoteague Island on the Eastern Shore.
And the circulation that started at about 20,000 in 1946
today totals just over 500,000, giving Cooperative Living the largest
circulation of any Virginia publication: newspaper or magazine, print or
online, whether daily, weekly, or monthly.
As your cooperative magazine, we work hard to provide you
with the information you need about your utility, from director elections
and bylaw changes, to new services, to legislative and regulatory news
affecting cooperatives, to
suggestions on energy efficiency.
But for almost 70 years, we�ve also tried to stitch
together in words and pictures the people and places that make Virginia�s
rural areas and small towns such great places to live, to work, to raise a
family, and to retire.
You are the measure of our
success, especially if we provide you with a momentary respite from the
travails of the world; if we give you a nugget of information that saves you
a few dollars; if we avoid cheap sentimentality yet still bring a smile to
your face or a tear to your eye; if we give you a new way of looking at an
old topic; or if we simply inspire you or lift your spirits.
And, of course, do all of that for the cost of a postage
stamp.
