A Family of Members
I have been a member of LCWA now for over three years and volunteering for much of that time. I have noticed many really good things about LCWA and its members. One of the things I’ve noticed is that even those members who don’t have time to volunteer can still help—as long as they understand and appreciate our volunteer model!
In fact, I’ve noticed in quite a few locations around our service area that many members and volunteers treat each other almost like family—they are neighbors helping each other. Those are the best interactions: when the volunteer comes out with a sense of community spirit, and the members receives it as such.
The Wrong Perspective
In contrast, the wrong way to look at a LCWA subscription is in a transactional way. Every once in a while we get a call from a member saying: “I pay you $50 a month you have to fix my internet now!”
The reason that’s wrong is that such members need to realize this: LCWA internet service is really made possible by two things:
- Your monthly payment
- Volunteers offering their time free.
If it weren’t for #2, your monthly payment would be much, much higher. In fact, if we had to pay everyone for every activity that is done in LCWA, your monthly rate might be twice what it is now. We focus on the hardest-to-reach areas in the county. We don’t cherry pick easy-to reach clients like Comcast and CenturyLink do. So you are getting a lot for our low fee.
The Right Perspective
So really, even if you have no time to volunteer, you are still a volunteer in this way: you will help and support this rural cooperative volunteer model by:
- By appreciating the work that volunteers do.
- By being patient with the timing of fixes—many of these volunteers have fulltime jobs and they can’t respond the moment you call.
- By attempting to fix problems yourself: we have some new online guides for fixing routers and radios yourself, so please use them if you can. You can find them at this link.
- By understanding how unique this rural internet coop is in being able to serve this area.
Think of LCWA as a family of members who are all helping each other in a challenging and widely-spread rural setting; when you look at it that way, you will be amazed at what we are accomplishing.
Comment (1)
This is the truth! I’ve been a customer of the high-profit ISPs in urban areas, and done business with them as a technical and business analyst, and they are focused on profit above all. Rural customers are not profitable enough to interest the big providers. I like the LCWA model much better; if you don’t want to be crowded together in profit-making dense housing subdivisions, we’d better focus on helping each other and enabling volunteers and co-operative efforts to get what we need. Show a little love to your neighbors!