Mia Birdsong

She sits on the Board of Directors of the Tannery World Dance & Cultural Center and the North Oakland Community Charter School.

[1] Birdsong previously served as Vice President of the Family Independence Initiative (FII), an organization dedicated to supporting the self-determination of low-income people and communities.

At FII, she created and curated the Torchlight Prize, an award for groups of regular people working together to strengthen their own communities.

She has spent time organizing to abolish prisons, teaching teenagers about sex and drugs, interviewing literary luminaries like Edwidge Danticat, David Foster Wallace, and John Irving, and attending births as a midwifery apprentice.

Birdsong also co-founded Canerow, a resource for people dedicated to raising children of color in a world that reflects the spectrum of who they are.