Rand Wentworth

Rand is the Louis Bacon Senior Fellow in Environmental Leadership at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy and a member of the faculty for the Senior Executive Fellows at the Harvard Kennedy School. He also serves as president emeritus of the Land Trust Alliance, a national conservation organization based in Washington, DC which serves as the leader for 1100 land trusts with 8,000 staff, 16,000 board members and 4.6 million members. He served as president from 2002-2016 and is widely recognized for expanding the pace and quality of land conservation in America. Rand has testified before Congress three times and led a coalition that built bi-partisan support in Congress for a bill that dramatically expanded the tax incentives for donations of conservation easements. During his leadership, land trusts doubled the annual pace of conservation in America and have now protected over 56 million acres. During his time as president, the Land Trust Alliance created a national accreditation system; built a virtual university for land conservation training 5000 people each year; and Terrafirma, an innovative insurance service that funds the legal costs of defending conserved lands from legal challenge. Before joining the Land Trust Alliance, Rand served as vice president and founding director of the Atlanta office of the Trust for Public Land. Prior to his career in conservation, Mr. Wentworth was president of a commercial real estate development company based in Atlanta. He is a graduate of Yale University and holds an MBA in finance from Cornell University.