More About Jean Theron Willoughby

Jean Willoughby serves as Executive Director of Agrarian Trust, working with our team to catalyze community ownership and support for next-generation farmers. She was a founding advisor to Agrarian Trust starting in 2014, joined the Board of Directors, and was later Agrarian Trust’s first hired staff member. A long-time advocate for land justice in many forms, she sees community ownership and stewardship of farmland, housing, and business as essential to rebuilding multiracial alliances, restoring the commons, and strengthening solidarity across all demographics of society.

As a white antiracist organizer, Jean has served as a Trainer with the national team of the Racial Equity Institute since 2018. She and her colleagues have worked with 100+ educational, corporate, nonprofit, and government organizations across the country including the CDC and NIH. Collaborating with LaShauna Austria and Seeds of Change Consulting, she has worked with organizations from North Carolina’s Triangle Land Conservancy to the Massachusetts Food System Collaborative. Jean's writings on race and the food system have appeared in YES! Magazine. A trained clinical herbalist, her book Nature’s Remedies: An Illustrated Guide to Healing Herbs was published by Chronicle Books.

Raised in public housing in and around Little Rock, Arkansas during an escalation of the "War on Drugs," she grew up in concentrated poverty and left to attend high school in Los Angeles, California. Drawing on her family's experiences as poor, landless, white sharecroppers in the rural South, Jean studied Sociology at Wesleyan University. After first pursuing a career in public health, she found a calling in the movement to transform the food system from an exploitative and exclusionary industry into a regenerative, inclusive expression of care and respect for land and community. After living in North Carolina and Washington, DC for a decade, she currently resides and organizes in Florida, the historic home of many indigenous nations including the Timucua, Potano, and Alachua Seminole, and a great place for a racial equity organizer to be.