Katie Smith Milway
Katie Smith Milway, winner of the Massachusetts Best Book for Children Award and Children’s Africana Book Award, works to bring world issues to elementary and middle school children. Her books, One Hen: How One Small Loan Made a Big Difference set in rural Ghana, The Good Garden: How One Family Went from Hunger to Having Enough, set in the Honduran hillsides, and Mimi’s Village and How Basic Health Care Transformed It, set in western Kenya; and The Banana-Leaf Ball: How Play Can Change the World, set in a refugee camp in Tanzania– introduce young readers to global issues, microfinance, food security & basic health care – and how children can help. An educator movement that grew around her writing led to the 2009 founding of One Hen, which offers teacher manuals and workbooks that use stories, interactive media and hands-on activities to teach entrepreneurship and giving back in classrooms across the country and around the world. One Hen has been translated into ten languages including French, Haitian Creole, Portuguese, Mandarin and Korean.
She has 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 Sanchez (role model for The Good Garden’s teacher).
Katie has served on the boards of World Vision US, Veritas Forum, One Hen Inc. and the Anna B. Stearns Foundation. A graduate of Stanford University, Free University of Brussels and INSEAD, Katie spent a decade working in and around a dozen countries in Africa on sustainable development projects, including village banking, food security, primary health care, water resourcing and education.
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