Mia Birdsong

Mia is a pathfinder, community curator, and storyteller who steadily engages the
leadership and wisdom of people experiencing injustice to chart new visions of
American life. She has a gift for making visible and leveraging the brilliance of everyday
people so that our collective gifts reach larger spheres of influence, cultural and
political change, and create wellbeing for everyone.

In her book How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community
(Hachette, June 2020), Mia charts swaths of community life and points us toward the
promise of our collective vitality. In “More Than Enough,” her podcast miniseries from
The Nation, she expands the current guaranteed income movement by tapping into the
voices and visions of low-income people. Previously, as founding Co-Director of
Family Story, Mia lifted up a new national story about what makes a good family. As
Vice President of the Family Independence Initiative, she leveraged the power of data
and stories to illuminate and accelerate the initiative low-income families take to
improve their lives.

Believing that, taken collectively, we are the guides we most need, Mia has made an art
out of inviting people into rich explorations of how we map paths forward. Her public
conversations, like the New America series centering Black women as agents of change
and her 2015 TED talk “The Story We Tell About Poverty Isn’t True,” draw targeted
attention to the stories of people who are finding their way into leadership
roles despite myriad barriers, while also highlighting the vibrant terrain of
all marginalized people who are leading on the ground and solving for tomorrow.

Mia is a Senior Fellow of the Economic Security Project. She was an inaugural Ascend
Fellow and faculty member with The Aspen Institute, a New America California Fellow,
and Advocate-in-Residence with University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social
Policy and Practice. Mia lives and dreams big on the occupied land of the Chochenyo
Ohlone people (AKA Oakland, CA).