ohio director

Brian Williams had a 25-year career in journalism before joining American Farmland Trust as Director for Ohio. In much of that time—in five Ohio cities and two other states—he focused on land use, planning, farmland preservation, urban revitalization, transportation and regional cooperation.

After leaving the Columbus Dispatch in early 2004, Williams turned his passion for those issues into a private consulting effort. He worked as a freelance writer, policy analyst and volunteer for various non-profit groups, public agencies and private businesses, then spent most of 2005 as the central Ohio director of Greater Ohio, a statewide smart-growth advocacy campaign.

As a reporter in Ohio, Illinois and Minnesota, Williams developed a great interest in planning, zoning, land-use and transportation. In nine years with the Dispatch—first covering agriculture for over four years, then writing about urban affairs—he delved into sprawl from the outside in and the inside out. Two years ago, he realized land-use-policy had supplanted journalism as his passion.

Williams worked for three small Ohio papers after graduating from Ohio State University in 1978. In 1982, he moved to Chicago and worked for a chain of neighborhood and suburban weekly newspapers, and then for United Press International. In 1987, he and his wife moved to Thailand for a year, where Williams worked for an English-language daily. He returned to Ohio in 1988 for a Kiplinger Fellowship in Public Affairs Reporting and earned a master’s degree from Ohio State.

He worked for the newspaper in Springfield, Ohio, for a year, then spent five years as an editorial writer, columnist and special-projects reporter—with a specialty in land-use issues—in Rochester, Minn., before returning to Ohio in 1995.

Williams is married to a public-school teacher and has three sons, aged 14, 12 and 8, and lives in Clintonville, a Columbus neighborhood north of Ohio State University.