Join PRAM Central for our November chapter meeting on November 18 at 11:45 a.m. with featured speaker Greg Flynn, discussing planning and promoting events in the times of COVID-19.

​

The city of Pearl has worked hard to bring a close sense of community to a population of nearly 27,000 residents. It’s no secret that holiday events are the biggest draw, from the Christmas Parade, to Halloween Trick-or-Treating, to Fourth of July Fireworks. Those events are hard enough to plan and pull off in good times, but how do you make them successful during a pandemic? Greg Flynn, Pearl’s Public Information and Communications Director, will give us some insight into how they are keeping people motivated with positive promotion and planning. Greg Flynn joined the City of Pearl as Public Information and Communications Director in May 2019. His responsibilities are wide-ranging, as the spokesperson for all city departments, social media and website manager, along with event planning and coordination. 

​

Flynn is also the host of programming on the city’s TV station (PMBtv20) and radio station (104.5 FM). He has also been the play-by-play voice of Pearl High School Athletic broadcasts since 2015. 

​

He previously worked at the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency as External Affairs Director. For more than 11 years, he worked with the public, media, state legislators and members of Congress on emergency management issues. He worked 27 federally declared disasters: 22 in Mississippi and five others nationwide. Flynn was deployed to work on disasters in Iowa for historic flooding, a massive Kentucky ice storm, assisted the State of Florida with earthquake response to Haiti in 2010, to New Jersey following Hurricane Sandy in 2012, and to Hawaii in 2018 for volcano eruption recovery. He was also deployed for nearly three months to Biloxi for the BP Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico during the spring-summer of 2010. 

​

Prior to that Flynn worked 14 years as a television reporter and anchor in Jackson, MS, for CBS affiliate WJTV and ABC affiliate WAPT. Flynn won two regional Emmy awards while at WAPT in 2006 for coverage of Hurricane Katrina and has earned a total of 22 Associated Press awards. Other highlights of his television career include traveling to Iraq with the Mississippi Air National Guard for a series of stories on medical evacuations of soldiers, interviewing three U.S. Presidents, covering four Super Bowls and a Final Four. 

​

A native of Ft. Lauderdale, FL, Flynn is a 1994 graduate of the University of Missouri-Columbia with a Bachelor of Journalism degree. 

​

Greg, his wife Samantha, son Jackson, and stepdaughter Charlee, live in Pearl with their dogs, Belle and Gretchen, and cat, Maggie.