Cuivre River Electric Cooperative (CREC) brought home an award in the 2023 Spotlight on Excellence Awards program, a national competition among America’s electric cooperatives, sponsored by the Council of Rural Electric Communicators and the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association.

CREC received a Gold Award in the category of Special Publications – Large, for their history book, The Power of Connections: Milestones and Innovations from Missouri’s Largest Electric Cooperative. The book is the second installment of CREC’s history to date, covering the years from 1998-2021. The co-op’s first book, The Power of People: Building Today for a Better Tomorrow, chronicles CREC’s beginnings from 1941-1998.

“I’m proud of our communications team and the invaluable work they do each day for our co-op members,” said CEO and President Doug Tracy. “Because of our team’s strong communication efforts, we can further the cooperative mission to promote, support, and protect the community we serve.”

Winners were recognized during Connect, a national communications and marketing professional conference in Jacksonville, Florida, this May.

“The Spotlight on Excellence Awards Program has been recognizing outstanding co-op communicators and their work for more than 35 years – that work is all the more critical in today’s evolving energy industry,” said Council of Rural Electric Communicators President Scott Gates, senior editor with North Carolina’s Electric Cooperatives.

The annual Spotlight on Excellence Awards program honors electric cooperatives and related organizations' best communication and marketing efforts nationwide. More than 650 entries were submitted across 18 different categories, including writing, graphic design, digital communications, campaign development, and more. Faculty members from the University of Missouri Columbia, as well as noted professionals in the fields of marketing and digital communications and newspapers, judged the entries.