Youth Tour

The program is much more than a sightseeing trip. While delegates visit areas of civic, historical, and cultural importance, they also meet with their elected representatives and learn about electric cooperatives. Along the way, they network with other youth, make lasting friendships, build knowledge, and develop skills that will help them later in life.

OLIVIA VELASQUEZ, 2013

The Youth Tour was a pivotal experience during my transition from high school to college. Growing up in a tiny Ohio village, attending even tinier Pandora-Gilboa High School, I attended Youth Tour in 2013. After high school, I pursued my education at Harvard University, and I am currently studying at the University of Vermont Larner College of Medicine.

Missy Kidwell, senior service specialist at Consolidated Cooperative in Mount Gilead, is assistant director of Ohio’s Youth Tour program. She had been involved in the process of selecting students to attend the trip for several years before she decided to attend as a chaperone. “Being able to see these students start out as strangers but then cultivate a lifelong friendship by the end of the week was pretty amazing,” she says. “I always knew it was an important experience, but didn’t realize exactly how special it was until I saw it in person.”

Like a vast number of people in rural areas of Ohio and the rest of the nation, Hicks and his family have limited access to high-speed internet. The one company that provides broadband service where he lives promises connection speeds “up to 5 megabits per second,” but he says tests on the line show it’s rarely above 1 Mbps. What’s more, service in his area, even at that level, is expensive.

Satellite broadband could be an option but costs even more.

Every June for the past 39 years, high school students from co-op families have attended the Electric Cooperatives Youth Tour — a weeklong leadership experience in Washington, D.C., sponsored by their co-op. Youth Tour is an experience unlike any other — full of fun, friends, and memories that last a lifetime.

For 38 years, the Ohio’s Electric Cooperatives Youth Tour to Washington, D.C., has given high school students a unique perspective on our nation’s capital and the electric cooperative world.

It is a fundamentally different experience than any other youth trip to D.C. It is a more personal, more engaging, and more rewarding experience — one where participants can meet new people from around the state and the country while broadening their knowledge of our government institutions.