Burt Peretsky is a highly accomplished, award-winning strategic communications executive with extensive experience in providing high-visibility private and public sector organizations with risk and crisis communication support, including preparation for public meetings, media training and support and community relations.  Burt is also a former major-market newspaper journalist with an additional 10 years in television, one of the few communications practitioners with experience inside both the print and electronic media.

For FOCUS GROUP, Burt is serving a wide variety of clients, conducting presentation and risk communication training for such companies as General Motors and Osram Sylvania, and such government agencies as the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and NASA – for the John Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

For the last several years, Burt has provided strategic communications and public meeting preparation assistance and support for NASA and state and local agency staff members as part of a wide-ranging community relations program that he helped create and is implementing for NASA’s groundwater cleanup program at JPL. Services have included developing and working with technical and other staff in preparing responses to potential  “Tough Questions” and in helping to ensure that staff are prepared to deliver those responses – a critical part of any community relations effort. In addition to meeting preparation, Burt helps to conduct comprehensive meeting evaluation sessions, recommending improvements and techniques that have been integrated into NASA’s strategic communications program at JPL.

Over a three-year period, Burt has also helped conduct media and risk communication training for NASA personnel at the John Glenn Research Center, which is decommissioning a reactor facility at its Plum Brook Station in Sandusky, OH.  He has helped prepare NASA for several “Community Information Sessions,” news media tours, and news briefings on the decommissioning project.

Burt has also assisted in communications preparedness and media training programming for General Motors Executives at the company’s Detroit headquarters; among the “students” at the sessions was GM’s Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Ray G. Young.  Burt has also taught crisis communications preparedness to manufacturing executives from around the world at the Danvers, Massachusetts headquarters of Osram Sylvania.

Before joining FOCUS GROUP, Burt served as Director of Communications for four years of Emerson College’s.  He directed the College’s so-called “Town-Gown” community relations efforts, working closely with community and neighborhood groups as Emerson moved many of its campus facilities from Boston’s Back Bay to the city’s Midtown Cultural and Chinatown Districts.

Earlier, for ten years as Director of Public Relations for WCVB-TV in Boston, Burt represented the station in an array of public forums, working with and often speaking to civic, charitable, business, and fraternal organizations throughout New England.