my cover letter to the environmental defense fund

April 21, 2014

Environmental Defense Fund

Attn: Human Capital Recruitment

257 Park Avenue South

New York, NY  10010

Re: Clean Energy Finance Manager Role

To Whom It May Concern:

Thank you for considering me for the Clean Energy Finance Manager role.  Our human energy future depends on passion, positivity, education, innovation, tenacity, and genuine human relationships.  Your values are my values.

My own unquenchable ambition for protecting our environment goes back to the late 1980’s as a child, feeling tremendous responsibility recycling my parents’ aluminum cans.  That ambition to positively impact our environment has followed me throughout my adult life.  The compelling and heartfelt argument to walk softly on our earth resonates strongly within me.  

While spending more than a decade in banking and finance, my professional experience has traversed the nonprofit, the public, and the private sectors.  My unconventional path challenged me to learn core banking and finance activities, above and beyond the ordinary.  The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and its ambitious clean energy development efforts will benefit from my experiences:   

• Selling complex financial instruments, such as annuities and long term care solutions;

• Reporting to bank boards, bank committees, and a state credit union commissioner;

• Running a community bank’s Asset / Liability Management (ALM) modeling process;

• Building an indirect auto loan Asset-Backed Security facility with counterparties;

• Conducting unassisted state credit union regulatory examinations; and,

• Practicing entrepreneurship in the insurance and management consulting space.

These experiences taught me that our society can create significant change through articulation and strategy.  Our world must adapt its industrial age energy solutions.  Clean energy answers our human energy challenges and will lay the groundwork for information age power generation.  

Thank you again for your time.  I look forward to your feedback.

With trust and honor,

Blake Mendez