CEA President John C. Mozena has been on both sides of the economic development wars. A long-time marketing and communications professional and former journalist, he spent two decades in private-sector agency and corporate roles where his clients often included economic development entities and programs. As a public relations agency account lead, he worked with six downtown development authorities, a major regional tourism bureau and convention center, three national industry trade associations, multiple commercial real estate developers and a variety of other clients with interests in economic development policy. He was the author of innumerable press releases and talking points announcing stimulus funding, state tax credits, manufacturing plant openings, public-private partnerships and other deals and initiatives touting “job creation” and “economic impact.”

After leaving the private sector, Mozena became the vice president for marketing and communications at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, Michigan’s free-market public policy think tank. At the Mackinac Center, he worked closely with the nationally-recognized research and policy team in its Morey Fiscal Policy Initiative to provide marketing and communications planning and support for their economic development policy work. He left the Mackinac Center in 2016 and worked as a marketing and communications consultant for public policy organizations before co-founding the CEA.

In the 1990s, Mozena co-founded the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE), a grassroots organization advocating for policy tools to fight the growing problem of junk “spam” email for consumers. As CAUCE’s primary media contact, he was quoted in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Newsweek, Wired, NPR, PBS, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, CBS Radio, Fox News Channel, BBC and more than 100 other media outlets.

He is a graduate of the Atlas Network’s Atlas Leadership Academy, including its Think Tank Leadership Training program; a member of the American Enterprise Institute Leadership Network; a Fellow at the Better Cities Project and holds an accreditation in public relations (APR) from the Public Relations Society of America.