Conservation Leader to Offer Public Seminar

On November 14 at 6:30 p.m. in the Fisher Museum, national conservation leader Rand Wentworth will offer a free public seminar on best practices for leadership in the complex process of conserving land. The event is open to the public, and especially geared towards community leaders, landowners, conservationists, and students.

Wentworth is the Louis Bacon Senior Fellow in Environmental Leadership at Harvard University. From 2002 to 2016, he served as President of the Land Trust Alliance, a national conservation organization that serves as the leader for 1,100 land trusts. With Wentworth at the helm, the Alliance built its accreditation program, the Terrafirma legal defense insurance, and bi-partisan support in Congress to expand funding and tax incentives for conservation. Under his leadership, land trusts doubled the annual pace of conservation in America.

"Today, the most effective leaders are geniuses at building relationships, teams, and coalitions," says Wentworth. "They gain power by giving it away." In this event, Wentworth will draw on the latest research from the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard Business School, and discuss the leadership practices that get proven results.

Wentworth is a graduate of Yale University and holds an MBA in finance from Cornell University. Before joining the Land Trust Alliance, he served as vice president and founding director of the Atlanta office of the Trust for Public Land, where he tripled the size of the national park honoring Martin Luther King, Jr. and completed a $143 million capital campaign to protect 70 miles along the Chattahoochee River, the primary drinking water supply for the City of Atlanta.

Wentworth's seminar is co-sponsored by the Harvard Kennedy School's Center for Public Leadership. The event is a part of the Wildlands and Woodlands initiative of the Harvard Forest, which recently released a new report calling for the protection of 70% of New England in forests and 7% of the landscape in farmland by 2060, reports on recent trends in land-use change and conservation funding, and makes recommendations for slowing and shifting development in a way that maintains the connection between communities and the land that sustains them.

• Learn more about the Wildlands and Woodlands initiative.

(Photo by David Foster)