Jared Spears
Jared Spears is a writer, researcher, communications strategist and facilitator. Inhabiting the Mahicannituck (Hudson) River Valley, he is an advocate for more equitable organizational structures and citizen-led initiatives that further an economics in service to life.
Serving as the Schumacher Center’s Director of Communications + Resources from October, 2021 to October, 2024, Jared contributed to the Center’s digital publications and helped to further the BerkShares local currency initiative as well as the Berkshire Community Land Trust’s Farmsteads for Farmers land access campaign. In 2023, he conducted an outreach and research project on Community Land Trusts for Industry, exploring the applicability of the CLT model of community land ownership for coal plant, coalfield, and brownfield redevelopment as part of a just transition.
Jared’s public writings advance just, life-affirming solutions to our planet’s climate and ecological crises. His writing on culture, labor and ecology has appeared with It’s Freezing in LA!, The Seattle Times, The Natural Farmer, Futures of Work, Non Profit Quarterly, The World Transformedand Yes!magazine, among others. He has been interviewed on local currencies and community land trusts by Nonviolence Radio, The Lincoln Institute on Land Policy, WBUR Radio, The Boston Globe, Vanity Fair, WIRED magazine, and others, and presented on BerkShares at the 2022 RAMICS Complementary Currencies Conference in Sofia, Bulgaria.
He continues to champion complementary currency locally with Hudson Valley Currents.
Jared earned his M.A. in Cultural and Critical Studies from the University of Westminster in London in 2020. Prior to joining the Schumacher Center, Jared worked for several small communications strategy firms in New York City.