In this episode of The Co-op Heroes Podcast, we sit down with Walt Stephens, Safety Manager at Brunswick EMC in Shallotte, North Carolina, recorded live at the NRECA Safety Leadership Summit in St. Louis, Missouri. He makes the case that the way electric cooperatives have been communicating safety for 30 years is not broken, but it is not enough anymore.

Most co-ops still run safety the way they always have. PowerPoint in a conference room, a classroom full of mixed generations, and the expectation that information delivered equals information retained. And for a long time, that worked well enough. But the workforce has changed, and the way people learn has changed with it, and Walt Stephens has spent the last few years watching the gap between the two grow wider.

Walt has been in safety for 31 years. He has sat through the evolution of the industry and watched each new generation come in with a different relationship to information, authority, and technology. What he noticed is not a problem with the younger generation. It is a problem with the medium. A 25-year-old who needs to fix his car does not open a manual. He pulls up a YouTube video. Walt asked himself a simple question: what would happen if we met them there instead of asking them to come to us?

The answer he landed on is a short-form video library, built and maintained by the crews themselves, hosted on a closed social platform, and designed to feel more like scrolling than sitting through a seminar. The idea is still young. The infrastructure is still being figured out. But the CEO bought in, a neighboring co-op CEO heard the pitch and immediately asked how to get involved, and Walt already has a working Instagram account running a proof of concept inside Brunswick EMC.

Featured topics:

• Why 30-second videos may do more for safety retention than a 90-minute PowerPoint
• The culture shift required to let employees post from the field instead of locking everything down
• What Hurricane Helene revealed about the value of shared, searchable field knowledge across co-ops
• How crowdsourcing safety content could build a statewide library connecting mountain crews with coastal crews
• What Walt learned from his daughter's cat account about meeting your audience where they are

Walt is not proposing to throw out the apprentice program or the LMS or the safety manual. He is proposing to add something that the current system cannot provide on its own: content that feels native to the people it is trying to reach, made by the people doing the work, and available whenever they have 30 seconds and a reason to look.

This is a conversation about what it actually takes to stay relevant to a new generation of lineworkers, and what happens when a 31-year safety veteran decides to stop fighting the scroll and start using it.