Through the generosity of its customers — who agree to round their electric bills up to the next highest dollar amount each month — the Baldwin County Electric Membership Charitable Foundation recently awarded grants to four local agencies.
Who Received Checks
Receiving checks on behalf of their agencies were Baldwin Family Village Development Officer Dr. Jennifer Winstead and Director Hilary Williams; Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Central Gulf Coast President and CEO Aimee Risser; and Ecumenical Ministries Executive Director Sally Deane.
How Operation Round-Up Works
The program’s mechanism is deliberately simple. A participating member’s bill is rounded up to the next whole dollar, and the difference — an average of about 50 cents a month, never more than 99 cents — goes into a charitable fund administered by the cooperative’s foundation.
No single contribution is large enough for a household to notice. Aggregated across a cooperative’s membership every month, the fund becomes substantial enough to award meaningful grants to local agencies several times a year.
That structure is why round-up programs have spread widely among electric cooperatives. The participation threshold is effectively zero, and the money stays in the service territory where it was collected.
The Cooperative Model
An electric membership cooperative is owned by the people it serves rather than by outside shareholders, and programs like Operation Round-Up reflect that structure directly. The members supply the funds, and the grants return to organizations serving those same communities.
The Recipients
The organizations receiving grants work across different parts of the local safety net.
Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Central Gulf Coast operates the mentoring model that pairs adult volunteers with young people over sustained relationships. Ecumenical Ministries provides community services through a faith-based framework. Baldwin Family Village works with families in the county.
Grants of this size matter disproportionately to organizations of this size. For a small local nonprofit, a foundation grant can cover a program cost that no individual donor campaign would readily fund.
Participating
Baldwin EMC members interested in enrolling in Operation Round-Up, and local nonprofits interested in applying for future grant cycles, can contact the Baldwin County Electric Membership Charitable Foundation for details.