Excerpts: This book was written to help rural electric cooperatives grow and prosper as service organizations in a modern rural America. In 1936, when Congress passed the Rural Electrification Act, it emphasized the role that cooperatives were to play in the vast task that lay ahead. It authorized the Administrator of REA to give preference in making loans to cooperative and other nonprofit associations. Since then the co-ops, owned by the people they serve, have taken the initiative in bringing electric power to rural areas. About 95 percent of all REA loans have been made to these private, locally owned and locally operated, enterprises. It is in the interest of all American taxpayers, as well as in accordance with the spirit of the Rural Electrification Act, that the rural electric co-ops be kept strong and sound business enterprises. Yet there are threats to their strength. One of the most serious of those threats lies in an uninformed or poorly informed co-op membership. Experience of co-ops of all types has shown clearly that, next to inadequate management, the indifference of co-op members about their co-op has been the chief cause of co-op failure. Realizing the nature of this threat to their welfare or to their very existence, rural electric co-ops are taking steps to inform their members more fully about their rights and responsibilities as owners of rural power systems. At the same time they are informing them about an equally important matter—the proper use of their electric service. The soundness of co-ops as rural service enterprises demands that their member-owners be fully aware of what electricity can do to improve working and living conditions on their farms, in their homes, and in their communities. This handbook is concerned more with the How than with the What. It is intended as a working tool for the men and women who have the broad task of fully informing the member-owners of the Nation's rural co-op power systems
