Olivia Watkins
Olivia Watkins operates at a frontier most institutions haven't found yet: the place where racial equity, ecological regeneration, and patient capital converge.
An impact investor and systems builder, Olivia has spent nearly a decade designing financial infrastructure for communities that the mainstream economy was built to exclude. As co-founder of Black Farmer Fund, she helped grow one of the Northeast's most consequential reparative investment vehicles, a $15M integrated capital fund that has redirected resources toward Black farmers and food entrepreneurs while reimagining what due diligence, governance, and community wealth look like when built from the inside out. The work earned her recognition as a 2023 James Beard Foundation Humanitarian of the Year and a place on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Social Impact list.
She brings that same orientation to her board role at Iroquois Valley Farmland REIT, a $100M organic farmland trust, where she chairs the finance and governance committees and engages directly with the mechanics of for-profit land stewardship, investor accountability, and long-horizon ecological returns. Deep fluency in both community development finance and institutional land investment is rare. Olivia holds both.
Her thinking on reparative finance shapes emerging practice across the field. The core distinction she draws is between investing with intention and investing to repair. She advises organizations on the architecture of just capital: how to structure it, how to deploy it, and how to sustain it long after the founding moment has passed.
She is based in the Hudson Valley, where land stewardship is not an abstraction.