Jim Farnam
Vice-President; Principal, Farnam Associates, LLC
Jim Farnam serves as Vice-president of the Board and came to the merged organization from the New Haven Farms board where he served as President. In that position he helped facilitate the merger discussions from fall 2018 until the merger was completed on January 1, 2020.
Jim is the owner of Farnam Associates, LLC, a New Haven, CT-based consulting firm that works primarily with non-profit and public organizations and community initiatives designed to have significant social impact.
Jim has consulted with numerous New Haven, Connecticut, and northeastern U.S. community initiatives over the last 30 years, first through his partnership in Holt, Wexler & Farnam, LLP and since 2010, as Farnam Associates, LLC. The firm specializes in strategic planning, data-driven needs assessment, program evaluation, program development, organizational development, community data systems, grant writing, and project management.
Jim has facilitated numerous complex planning processes, planning studies, evaluations, grant proposals, and needs assessments. His work involves assisting groups of leaders and stakeholders in developing extensive data-driven understandings of their fields, crafting strategies and programs, evaluating their work, setting organizational priorities, and preparing complex plans and proposals.
Before entering consulting, Jim was the Director of Downtown and Harbor Development for the City of New Haven (1986-89). In that role he facilitated the initial acquisition by the New Haven Land Trust of the Long Wharf Preserve (aka Parcel K in the Long Wharf Redevelopment Plan) and the Eugene Fargeorge Quinnipiac Meadows Preserve.
Farnam is a graduate of Yale University and holds a Master’s Degree in City Planning from the University of Pennsylvania.
Jim was there as the beginning of the Land Trust. From a history of the NHLT: “an individual named Jim Farnam … was working with Lauren Brown in the City of New Haven’s Office of Downtown and Harbor Development under Mayor Biaglio DiLieto. Farnam had discovered that the City owned a landlocked piece of salt marsh near the Quinnipiac River, which was not being used by the City. He had the idea that it should be preserved. These forces combined late in 1981 when Wilkins, Farnam and Brown met in City Hall to discuss how each of their interests could be pulled together. The New Haven Land Trust itself was not started until February 1982. First, the initial threesome of Farnam, Wilkins, and Brown assembled a Board of Directors through the process of word of mouth” ITEM ID 2712