Franklin Holley
Director
North America
Insights
Expertise
Based in the Washington, DC area, Franklin Holley leads Anthesis Group’s regenerative agriculture offerings in North America, partnering with leading companies, producer organizations, NGOs and financial institutions to redefine our food and agriculture system’s relationship with nature. She leverages more than 20 years of experience in advancing the sustainability of agricultural value chains and championing solutions that conserve nature, ensure farmer livelihoods, meet corporate business objectives, and help feed a growing population in a resource-constrained world.
Franklin has worked with leading companies across the agricultural value chain, including Cargill, Inditex, Kering, The Coca-Cola Company, Unilever, VF Corps, and Walmart, among others. Prior to joining Anthesis, she led the launch of Conservation International’s Regenerative Fund for Nature — a €20 million grant-based mechanism supported by Kering and Inditex to provide funding to farming groups, project leaders, NGOs and others that are ready to test, prove, and scale practices that ensure the long-term health of the land while delivering benefits for farmers, nature, and the climate. She served as Vice Chair of Field to Market: The Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture and as an advisor on Colorado State University’s Department of Soil and Crop Sciences Industry Advisory Board.
Franklin’s previous experience includes working for international conservation NGOs, leading a Maryland-based community-development and natural-resources management non-profit, convening unlikely agriculture and food stakeholders on diverse challenges, and delivering nutrition education through agricultural extension programming. She spent her college summers volunteering on one of Heifer International’s Learning Center Farms in Ceres, CA. Franklin has an MSc in International Agricultural Development from the University of California, Davis and a BA in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Virginia.
