Randolph Wentworth

Rand Wentworth is the Louis Bacon Senior Fellow in Environmental Leadership, 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.

Wentworth 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, Wentworth served as vice president and founding director of the Atlanta office of the Trust for Public Land where he in 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.

Prior to his career in conservation, Mr. Wentworth was president of a commercial real estate development company based in Atlanta where he received the Visionary Regional Leadership Award from the Atlanta Regional Commission, the Community Leadership Award from the Urban Land Institute, and the Outstanding Young Atlantan Award.

Mr. Wentworth is a graduate of Yale University and holds an MBA in finance from Cornell University. He served as the Environmentalist in Residence at Middlebury College, was a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Architecture and City Planning at Georgia Tech and has lectured at Yale and Duke.