Mia Birdsong

Activist, Change Agent, Idea generator, Parent, Writer/Editor

Mia has spent more than 20 years fighting for the self-determination and pointing out the brilliant adaptations of everyday people. She is a Senior Fellow at the Economic Security Project and a Program Fellow at New America's Family Centered Social Policy program. In her previous role as Co-Director of Family Story, Mia updated this nation’s outdated picture of the American family (hint: rarely 2.5 kids and two heterosexual parents living behind a white picket fence). Previously, Mia worked as the Vice President of the Family Independence Initiative, where she created and curated the Torchlight Prize. Mia, whose 2015 TED talk–titled, “The Story We Tell About Poverty Isn’t True”–has been viewed over 1.6 million times already, has been published widely, and speaks at conferences and universities across the country. Mia is also a modern Renaissance woman. She has spent time organizing to abolish prisons, teaching teenagers about sex and drugs, interviewing literary luminaries like David Foster Wallace, John Irving, and Edwidge Danticat, and attending births as a midwifery apprentice. She is a graduate of Oberlin College, a New America California Fellow, and an inaugural Ascend Fellow of The Aspen Institute. She lives, dreams big, and keeps bees in Oakland, CA.

Liberation, social justice, joy, bees, art, storytelling, Black women.

Rethinking how we build family and community by learning from those who do it best--people of color, LGBTQ folks, immigrants, poor people . . .

Intersectional social justice, storytelling, universal basic income

I don’t hide my talents!