Grey to Green Festival – Wick Park

Michael Peck to speak at Grey to Green Festival Sept. 10 in Youngstown http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=286593994689082

Michael Peck founded MAPA Group ( www.mapagroup.net ) in 1994 as a creative and transactional business development consulting practice with operations in Washington DC, Atlanta, Georgia, Grand Rapids, Michigan, Barcelona and Madrid, Spain.  Michael serves as a volunteer advisory board member of the Apollo Alliance, the Blue Green Alliance, and the American Sustainable Business Council, as well as on the Wind Energy Foundation board.   For the past decade, Michael has served as the first North American delegate for Mondragon, the world’s largest worker-industrial cooperative. Starting in late 2009, Michael has helped to engineer a partnership between Mondragon and the United Steelworkers Union to create next generation jobs opportunities involving worker empowerment and ownership under a hybrid union-coop model.

In July, 2011, Michael was appointed Chairman of Isofoton North America, a leading Spanish PV cell & module manufacturer.  Isofoton will supply modules to the nation’s largest PV plant (49.9MW) east of the Rockies, sited on reclaimed mine lands in rural Appalachia in Noble County, Ohio, to be owned by a leading investor-owned utility and will construct a new PV assembly facility in Napoleon, Ohio, that will create up to 330 direct manufacturing jobs plus hundreds of indirect jobs with local contractors. Previously, working closely with Pennsylvania’s Administration and Legislature on a bipartisan basis during the 2002-2004 timeframe, Michael was instrumental in bringing the leading global wind turbine manufacturer and developer, Gamesa, to the Commonwealth in 2005 where the company since has invested over $220 million in two factories, one headquarters office, one central administration office, and multiple wind farms, and has created 900 in-state direct good and green jobs, and hundreds of indirect jobs with local contractors.  Over the 2004-2010 period, Gamesa achieved a number of firsts with Michael’s direct involvement: the first overseas wind turbine manufacturer to start building in the U.S., the first to sign and embrace an award-winning, progressive relationship with organized Labor (the United Steelworkers Union), the first to transform an abandoned brownfield industrial site into a green energy manufacturing hub, the first to achieve upwards of 65% domestic content, and the first to undertake a R&D partnership with a major U.S. defense aerospace & shipbuilding prime contractor (Newport News Shipbuilding) to develop and build next generation off-shore wind turbines “made in the USA”.  Candidate and President Obama has visited Gamesa’s Fairless Hills facilities twice.

Prior to forming MAPA Group, Michael served as a naval officer on active duty from 1976 –83, winning the Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Naval Forces Europe Leadership award in 1981, and completed his service as a Commander in the Naval Reserves in 1996. Michael also served as a defense and economic development assistant to the U.S. Senate Minority Leader (1984-86), as Executive Assistant to the President of the BDM Corporation (1986-88), and as a Senior Vice President for corporate business development at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) from 1988-94, the nation’s largest employee-owned R&D company at the time.”

Tags: 2011, featured event, Michael Peck, schedule