In this episode of The Co-op Heroes Podcast, we sit down with Jennifer Brogdon, CEO and General Manager of Upper Cumberland EMC, recorded live at the Tennessee Electric Cooperative Association meeting in Florence, Alabama. Jennifer's story is one of family roots, hard-won trust, and learning to lead through a crisis before she'd even settled into the job.

Jennifer grew up watching her uncle become an electrical engineer and her grandfather work as a lineman, and she followed a similar path into TVA, where she spent 28 years moving through engineering, marketing, and eventually regulatory oversight of local power companies. That last role taught her how to be both a help and a hard conversation, and it built the relationships that would later pull her into a co-op CEO seat.

Six weeks into the job, one of the worst ice storms in the co-op's history knocked out power to a third of its members. Jennifer walked through what it took to lead a team through repeated freeze and collapse cycles, why communicating constantly with members mattered as much as restoring the lines, and how that storm exposed a system still run on paper lists and yellow post-its.

What followed was a lesson in change management that took nearly a year to get right, not because the solution was wrong, but because the people who had to live with it weren't part of choosing it. Jennifer talks about stalling a rollout, rebuilding trust with her district managers, and the moment a visit to a neighboring co-op turned resistance into buy-in.

Featured topics:

• Coming up through TVA and the pull toward co-op leadership Leading a team through a week-long ice storm crisis six weeks into the role
• Why the "perfect" solution failed and what got the outage management system finally adopted
• The role of story and peer relationships in change management
• Where AI, distributed generation, and standardization are taking the grid over the next decade

Jennifer's outlook on where cooperatives are headed treats today's supply chain pressure and rising demand as an opening rather than a threat, one where co-ops build new expertise instead of waiting for someone else to solve it for them.

This is a conversation about what it looks like to lead through the moment nobody trained you for, and come out the other side with a better system and a stronger team.

In this episode of The Co-op Heroes Podcast, we sit down with James Tanneberger, CEO of South Central Indiana REMC, to talk about the programs that turn a utility into a neighbor. He makes the case that the smallest gestures, a rounded up bill, a hat off a Christmas tree, a hand on a truck door, are what set a cooperative apart from anywhere else he has worked.

James came to co-ops after years at municipal and investor owned electric companies, including the largest electric company in the country. South Central Indiana REMC is his first cooperative, and after eight and a half years there he says the culture is different in a way that shows up everywhere, especially in how close the company stays to the community it serves.

He walks through Operation Roundup, where members' bills are rounded up to the next dollar and a volunteer committee decides which nonprofits get the funds, right down to a heated debate over whether to fund a stray cat rescue. He talks about the employee auction that raises money for Christmas baskets, the tag tree in the lobby where staff pick a child's name and gift, and the coats and gloves left out all winter for anyone who needs them, no questions asked.

Featured topics:

How Operation Roundup works, and what actually happens in the room when members decide where the money goes

The Christmas auction and basket program, and how linemen end up bidding on $1,000 ladders for a good cause

The hat and glove tree in the lobby, and why the co-op never asks who takes one

Touch a truck events and live line demos, and what it means to teach kids and first responders real electrical safety

Where James finds new ideas, from IEC's monthly roundup of co-op news to conversations between neighboring co-ops

Why he thinks the industry needs a shared library of these community programs, so no one has to reinvent them alone

James is not describing a marketing strategy. He is describing a company where showing up for the community is just what people do, whether that means running a chainsaw, chairing a committee, or handing a stranger a pair of gloves.

This is a conversation about what it looks like when a cooperative decides its job includes more than keeping the lights on.

In this episode of The Co-op Heroes Podcast, Pablo Fuentes sits down with James Tanneberger, CEO of South Central Indiana REMC, to talk about a subject that gets more contentious by the month: electric cooperatives and data centers. Tanneberg makes the case that the mega load data centers people love to hate are already being replaced by something smaller, quieter, and a lot more useful to the communities hosting them.

Most people picture a data center the same way: 300 to 500 acres, seven buildings at a billion dollars apiece, millions of gallons of water running through and back out into a river. That picture is a year or two out of date. Tanneberger has spent the last year studying what comes next, and what he has found is that the technology is shrinking fast. Closed cycle cooling instead of continuous water flow. Denser GPUs in smaller footprints. Modular units that fit in shipping containers and could sit inside the fence of a substation.

The conversation goes past the buildings themselves and into what a data center can actually do for a co-op. Tanneberger's system is 98 percent residential, which means the co-op buys power at the two most expensive times of day, morning and evening, when everyone is home. A data center runs flat, all day, every day. Pair the two load curves and the co-op ends up buying more power when it's cheap, which brings costs down instead of up. Some of these smaller sites can even be set up as load modifying resources, meaning the co-op can shift a data center over to backup generation during a grid emergency and sell that flexibility back to the system operator. Revenue that didn't exist before, going straight into things like underground line conversions.

Featured topics:

• Why the mega load data centers of the last decade won't be the norm going forward, and what's replacing them

• How pairing data center load with residential load curves can actually lower the cost of power for members

• What a load modifying resource is, and how a data center paired with a backup generator can support grid reliability during peak demand

• The idea of distributed AI, and how existing co-op fiber infrastructure could network small modular sites together instead of building one massive campus

• The "a la carte" or colo data center model, and why it may end up being the more common version in rural America

• Why national security arguments around AI are shaping local permitting decisions whether communities like it or not

Tanneberger isn't arguing that data centers are good or bad. He's arguing that the version most people are picturing is already becoming outdated, and that co-ops who understand the shift early have a real chance to turn an unpopular trend into a benefit for their members.

This is a conversation about reading where an industry is headed before the rest of the room catches up.

In this episode of The Co-op Heroes Podcast, we sit down with Dale Kaufman, Staking Technician at Southern Indiana Power, recorded live at the Indiana Electric Cooperatives Safety and Operations Meeting in Noblesville, Indiana. He makes the case that staking is equal parts engineering, diplomacy, and institutional memory, and that the hardest part of his job has never been running wire.

Most people outside the industry have never heard the word staking. Dale Kaufman has spent nearly 30 years doing it. What he has learned is that the technical side, the spans and the framing and the cost comparisons, is straightforward once you understand the system. What is never straightforward is getting a farmer to let you cut a tree or a landowner to sign an easement. That is where the job actually lives.

Dale came to the co-op world the long way. His father was a lineman for a city municipal, and watching him work planted a seed early. When his father became disabled and could no longer hold a CDL, Dale made it his goal to carry that work forward. He got his foot in the door on a spray crew in 1996, making notes on broken strands and overgrown lines while he waited for his shot. Two years later, Southern Indiana Power called.

He has been there since 1998. In that time he has worked Hurricane Katrina restoration in Pascagoula, Mississippi, wading through chest-high black water with a chainsaw and water moccasins that were not afraid of him. He has watched co-ops move from paper maps to full GIS inventory with pole photos and GPS backpacks. He has priced out overhead versus underground on jobs where the two options came within $10,000 of each other and the right answer still depended on factors a spreadsheet could not capture.

Featured topics:

• Why staking has no single right answer, and why the linemen will always have something to say about the one you picked

• How easements and tree permissions turned out to be harder than any technical problem Dale has faced

• What Hurricane Katrina restoration looked like from the ground, in the swamps, with a chainsaw and a snake phobia

• Why vegetation crews remain one of the best pipelines into co-op careers, and what separates the people who stay

• How GIS has changed the staking job, and why Dale thinks the future is already arriving

• The overhead versus underground decision, and how Dale thinks through the tradeoffs when the numbers are close

Dale is not describing a job. He is describing a career built on showing up, knowing the system better than anyone in the room, and understanding that the people on the other side of an easement conversation are not obstacles. They are members. That distinction shapes everything about how he works.

This is a conversation about what nearly three decades at a co-op looks like when you knew at 12 years old where you wanted to be, and you spent the rest of your life earning your way there.

In this episode of The Co-op Heroes Podcast, we sit down with Jamie Conn, Safety Coordinator at Blue grass Energy in Nicholasville, Kentucky, recorded live at the NRECA Safety Leadership Summit in St. Louis, Missouri. He makes the case that most safety problems in the electric utility industry are not about rule following. They are about what happens in someone's mind long before they ever get to the task.

Most co-ops still treat safety as a compliance function. Deliver the information, check the box, move on. And for a long time, that worked well enough. But Jamie Conn has spent years watching what happens when you replace blame with relationship, and what becomes possible when people actually feel safe enough to tell the truth about what went wrong.

Jamie came to line work through the military and an unemployment office, with no background in utilities and no ambitions to become a lineman. What he found surprised him. Almost 17 years working the line gave him something most safety coordinators do not have: the experience of being the guy on the pole, the one carrying unspoken baggage to the job site, the one who knows what it feels like when the room turns into a blame session after an incident.

Then his brother died by suicide. That loss sent him into ministry, where he spent four years as a pastor before the pull of the industry brought him back. When a safety coordinator position opened up, it felt like the two halves of his career had finally found a reason to exist in the same room. The relational work of a pastor and the protection work of a safety professional turned out to be the same job in different gear.

Featured topics:

• Why accountability and blame are not the same thing, and why the difference between them is relationship
• How the posture of a room changes when a leader uses himself as the negative example first
• What a traffic accident investigation revealed about the difference between fixing people and fixing systems
• Why the most dangerous hazard in any job is the one you cannot imagine
• How ministry prepared Jamie to see what linemen bring to work that has nothing to do with the task at hand
• Why compliance is the lowest form of cognition, and what he is chasing instead

Jamie is not proposing to get rid of protocols or safety manuals or job briefings. He is proposing that none of those tools work the way they are supposed to unless the relationships underneath them are solid. Rules tell people what to do. Culture determines whether they actually do it, and whether they tell you when something goes wrong before it becomes an incident report.

This is a conversation about what safety looks like when a former lineman, pastor, and safety coordinator decides to stop treating people like robots and start engineering systems that account for the fact that they are not.

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.

In this episode of The Co-op Heroes Podcast, we sit down with Micah Thompson and JD Cox, recorded live at the NRECA Safety Leadership Summit in St. Louis, Missouri. They make the case that safety culture lives or dies on something most people in the industry are not comfortable talking about: love.

Most co-ops approach safety the way you would expect. Policies, training, federal standards, meetings in the break room. And then someone gets hurt anyway. Not because the rules were wrong. Because rules alone have never been enough to change what a person does at 2 in the morning after a five-day stretch in the rain.

JD Cox spent 38 years in the industry, 24 of them on a line crew. On his 21st birthday, a cable failure dropped a steel ball 29 feet onto the top of his head and broke his neck and back in two places. He came back to work 75 days later. What changed was not his knowledge of the safety manual. It was his understanding of why any of it actually matters. He has spent the years since building a message around the idea that compliance follows love, not the other way around.

Micah Thompson heard JD speak at an NRECA certification class in Madison and says nobody in the room made an impression like he did. He has spent his career trying to close the gap between what organizations say about safety and what they actually do when no one is watching. His test is simple: what do your people feel on Sunday night at nine o'clock?

Together they make the case that safety is not a goal, it is a promise. Goals get abandoned. Promises stick because they are tied to something real, the people waiting at home, the kids in the stands, the coworker riding shotgun every day.

Featured topics:

• Why love is the missing word in most safety conversations
• JD's accident on his 21st birthday and what it changed about how he sees the work
• The difference between a safety goal and a safety promise
• Moral courage and what the 1942 Lineman and Cableman Handbook got right
• What the Sunday night feeling tells you about the culture you actually have

Micah and JD are not the kind of safety professionals who lead with citations. They lead with character and conviction. Their message is that if you want people to follow the rules when things get hard, you have to give them a reason that matters more than the rules.

This is a conversation about what genuine care looks like in the field, and what it costs when it is not there.

Ken Macken dedicated his life and career to electric cooperatives. He knew the job from the inside: the crews, the culture, the moments where safety either holds or it doesn't. As Director of Safety and Training at NRECA, he became the leader of what is now one of the most attended electric utility safety conferences in the country, growing the Safety Leadership Summit this year in St. Louis to nearly 1,300 attendees. He didn't do that by talking about compliance. He did it by connecting with people.

Ken believed the shift from a process-first culture to a people-first culture was the most important thing happening in the cooperative world. He talked about it plainly, the crew of three or four guys who are irreplaceable, the wife at home waiting, the soccer game after the shift. He believed that when you understand your why, safety stops being a rule and starts being a commitment. He also believed that leadership is not a title. It is a price you pay, a willingness to set aside your own interests long enough to bring someone else to a higher level.

Ken's legendary 10-10-2-2 (come home with ten fingers, ten toes, two arms, and two legs) will live in the consciousness of electric cooperatives for generations.

Ken unexpectedly passed away two days after this conversation was recorded.

What he left behind is a body of work, a conference that will keep growing, and a way of thinking about safety that has shaped how cooperatives across the country show up for their people. This episode is our conversation, exactly as it happened.

Featured topics:

• Why leadership has to be at the center of any real safety culture

• The price of leadership and what it actually costs

• Technology, complacency, and the question of who owns who

• The aging grid and what Americans may have to rethink

• What 25 years in the cooperative world taught him about legacy

After the interview, we appended tributes submitted by some of the people Ken worked with who were deeply impacted by him.

The cooperative community lost one of its best. Ken will be deeply missed by everyone whose life he touched.

May this episode serve as a humble tribute to a man who lived for others. And may we strive to follow his example.