Personnel

The Blue Sky Foundation of North Carolina is pleased to announce that Don Markle is our Executive Director as of April 2000.

Don comes to the Blue Sky Foundation from SCANA Corporation of Columbia, South Carolina where he was manager of New Product Management and Development. Don was with SCANA for three years during which time he served as Manger of Commercial Marketing Services and Executive Director of the OneStep consolidate service pilot project. Don was instrumental in preparing the Corporation for the rigors of competition in the quickly deregulating utility environment, including those associated with e-commerce.

Don has an extensive background in building science, public policy development and non-profit management. These skills complement his management experience in for profit enterprises at SCANA and in his personal land development activities.

During the late 1980's and through the mid 1990's Don worked for the non-profit Alternative Energy Corporation (now Advanced Energy Concepts) of Raleigh. North Carolina. He served as Director of the Applied Building Science Center, which included the North Carolina Heat Pump Training Center, the Duct Diagnostic and Training Center, and Southeast Regional Geothermal Heat Pump Training Center. During Don's 8 years of leadership, AEC worked on more than 40 initiatives from Community Energy Campaigns, to Exemplary Home and Manufactured Home Standard Development, to Weatherizing hundreds of rural Methodist Churches for the Duke Endowment. The Building Science Center won three Department of Energy Innovation Awards and Don served as consultant on Staff at the National Association of Home Builders for six months to help initiate what became the Edison Electric Institute exemplary home program.

Prior to coming to the Southeast, Don worked for the University of Alaska Cooperative Extension Service where he initiated the Award winning Alaska Craftsman Home Program, which included an exemplary standard, a home rating system, mortgage incentives and statewide training program. Don also held management positions for the State of Alaska in policy development and project management positions. His duties included rewriting regulation, redrafting laws, and responsibility of 40 research and demonstration projects totaling nearly $15 million dollars across the wilderness of Alaska.

Don has been a syndicated newspaper columnist for building related information, started a radio station and graduated from the University of Hawaii with a BS in Geology and Geophysics in 1972.

We are pleased to have Don join the Blue Sky Foundation and look forward to an exiting and dynamic period of growth under his able stewardship.