Green Guru Network

I recently helped NJHEPS and its partner Kean University win a three-year $180k pollution prevention grant from EPA Region 2 (which will be starting 1 January '10) to provide multiple workshops to help educate the nearly 400 colleges and universities within Region 2 (NY, NJ, PR, and the VI) on how to reduce their energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, thus allowing the schools to protect the environment while saving operating costs. Also in early January, I will be co-keynote speaker at the 9th annual International Business & Economy Conference (IBEC 2010) in Prague, the Czech Republic, partnering with a long-time business associate, Deutsche Telekom's Vice President and Representative of the Board of Management for Sustainability and Climate Change, Mr. Ignacio Campino. I will be speaking on "Corporate Sustainability Performance Goes Mainstream: Investment Metrics and Business Risks/Opportunities", while my friend Ignacio speaks on "Integrating Sustainability into Deutsche Telekom's Global Business Operations and Culture". IBEC 2010 is organized by a group of leading business schools from around the world, and I previously was a keynote at IBEC 2009 in Udaipur India speaking on "Water, the Next Big Sustainability Issue after Climate Change", and spoke at IBEC 2008 in San Francisco on "Metrics for Measuring Sustainability Performance- Latest Developments in the Financial and Higher Education Sectors".

John Cusak is President of Gifford Park Associates (GPA), a management consulting firm specializing in helping investors, major companies and academic institutions understand the relationships between organizational sustainability performance and the bottom line financial performance & shareholder/stakeholder value of organizations, and profiting from those relationships.

Clients have included multinational companies, utilities, institutional investors, government agencies, academic institutions, venture capital firms, and a number of companies operating in the areas of carbon finance, clean technology and climate risk management. His most well-known GPA assignment was serving as the start-up CEO of Innovest, the corporate sustainability performance rating agency and investment research house, from 1998 to 2001.

Prior to starting GPA in 1993, he was a senior executive at Asea Brown Boveri (ABB), where he was head of several subsidiaries in the US and Europe, held technology marketing and R&D staff positions, and worked extensively with venture capital firms managing ABB's energy & environmental technologies venture fund. He has a MBA from NYU Stern School, and an MCE in Environmental Engineering & Science and a BCE in Civil Engineering from Manhattan College. His largest client role presently is serving as part-time Executive Director of the New Jersey Higher Education Partnership for Sustainability (NJHEPS), a consortium of 45+ colleges and universities working to integrate sustainability into their campus operations, curricula, research and communities. In addition, he is an adjunct finance professor at the Iona College Hagan School of Business in New Rochelle NY, teaching a course in Sustainable Finance for the past four years.