About Kent Wommack-Land Conservation | The Nature Conservancy

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Kent Wommack. © Kent Wommack/TNC

Kent Wommack

Lead, Global Lands Team

Brief Biography

Kent Wommack is the leader of The Nature Conservancy’s Global Land Conservation Team, and a lead strategist for some of the organization’s largest and most ambitious projects around the world. During his 28 years with the organization, Kent has directed three of the Conservancy's most successful state and country programs— in Maine, Australia and Canada—and served as Deputy Director of the Conservancy's Asia Pacific Region.

Kent has conceived and led some of the Conservancy's most innovative and complex projects, many of which have combined governmental, private sector, and philanthropic partners to achieve unprecedented landscape scale conservation.

Notable projects include: organizing the Conservancy's first public referendum for conservation land acquisition in 1987 (a strategy since replicated in over 40 states); the St. John River (the first time The Nature Conservancy used sustainable forestry as a funding and conservation strategy); Katahdin Forest Project (in which the Conservancy made a low-interest $50 million loan to a for-profit paper company in exchange for land and easements, later reselling the note back to the private sector linked to New Market Tax Credits); and partnerships with major foundations and governments to promote the establishment of new public, private and indigenous protected areas in Australia and Canada.

Kent is one of just nine Conservancy leaders featured in the book Nature’s Keepers, a business management profile of The Nature Conservancy’s first half century.

Kent is a graduate of Colby College (BA, Political Science) and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies (Master of Forest Science). He is also Vice President of the Elmina B. Sewall Foundation, a $150 million foundation that makes grants to conservation, animal welfare and human well-being projects, primarily in the State of Maine.