Katie Smith Milway - Author

Bestselling author Katie Smith Milway, whose CitizenKid books One Hen, The Good Garden, Mimi’s Village and The Banana-Leaf Ball have won numerous awards, is on a quest to bring world issues to elementary and middle school children. One Hen: How One Small Loan Made a Big Difference, set in Ghana, introduces kids to microfinance and the power of social entrepreneurship. One Hen gave rise to One Hen Academy (www.onehen.org), a social entrepreneurship curriculum with Boston Scores. Their downloadable lesson plans are used by educators to teach financial literacy and community engagement in more than 100 countries.#Katie’s 2010 book, The Good Garden: How One Family Went from Hunger to Having Enough, set in the Honduran hillsides, introduces kids to the concept of food security and shows how each of us, at any age, can combat global hunger (www.thegoodgarden.org). Mimi’s Village: And How Basic Health Care Transformed It is set in Kenya. It connects kids’ actions for global health to results in Africa. And her latest book, The Banana-Leaf Ball: How Play Can Change the World, is set at a refugee camp in Tanzania, where youth form a soccer team and grow socially and emotionally, finding community, confidence and hope.#Katie is also founder and principal of MilwayPLUS social impact advisors, and a former partner at The Bridgespan Group in Boston, where for a decade she led the firm’s knowledge practice. She has served on the board of relief and development agency World Vision U.S., coordinated community development programs in Latin America and Africa for Food for the Hungry International, and was a delegate to the 1992 Earth Summit. She has written several adult books on sustainable development, including The Human Farm: A Tale of Changing Lives and Changing Lands (Kumarian Press, 1994), which documented the work of sustainable agriculture pioneer Don Elias Sánchez (role model for The Good Garden’s teacher).#Prior to Bridgespan, Katie served as a consultant and senior director at Bain & Co., where she founded the firm’s global publishing group. A graduate of Stanford University, the Free University of Brussels and INSEAD, Katie spent a decade working in and around more than a dozen countries in Africa and Latin America on sustainable development projects, including village banking, food security, primary health care, water resourcing and education.