Tracy McBride joined Shenandoah Valley Electric Cooperative as its new vice president of finance and accounting on Jan. 30.
McBride brings 20 years of expertise in the financial services industry to SVEC, plus another 10 years of co-op experience. She most recently served as vice president of finance at York Electric Cooperative in South Carolina.
A New Jersey native, McBride is a Certified Public Accountant who earned an MBA from Cornell University. She earned an undergraduate degree in accounting from William Paterson University.
During frequent road trips from New Jersey to visit family in South Carolina, McBride passed through and made pit stops in the Shenandoah Valley. She is excited to have a more permanent stay.
For McBride, SVEC is another step toward answering a question she asked herself while working on Wall Street during the financial crisis of the late 2000s: “What do I want to do when I grow up?” Through a contact at NRECA, McBride left New York City and was introduced to the local cooperative family. An opportunity was then presented at Basin Electric Power Cooperative, a generation and transmission cooperative in Bismarck, N.D. She would later move closer to family by taking the position at York in South Carolina.
Her responsibilities with co-ops have included senior finance and accounting roles, including succession planning and business transformation.
“How do we get the next generation of talent ready for this industry?” McBride says. “I look at it as an honor to support the co-op family in this capacity.”
She might have a future co-op employee of her own. McBride’s son is a second-year mechanical engineering major at the University of South Carolina.
“What we do as a co-op family is amazing,” she says. “I wanted to connect myself with an industry that made a difference. That’s why I’ve never turned back. It has been very rewarding to me.”
–Report by Preston Knight, Communication Manager, Shenandoah Valley Electric Cooperative.