Mia Beers serves as Deputy Assistant Administrator in the Bureau for Resilience, Environment, and Food Security and is also the USAID Resilience Coordinator. She oversees the strategic direction and implementation of the Bureau’s work around nutrition and food systems; resilience, climate adaptation and shock-response programming; gender, localization and digital efforts;, and strategic engagement. She also oversees country support for the U.S. Government’s global hunger and food security initiative, Feed the Future, along with other key REFS lines of effort.
Ms. Beers has a 30-year career in the international humanitarian and development sector and is a member of the Senior Executive Service. She previously helped build USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, where she established the Office of Global Policy, Partnership, Programs and Communications and coordinated key strategies around humanitarian policy; emergency classification levels; early recovery, risk reduction and resilience; and localization. During that time, she had oversight for more than 150 staff in six locations around the world, focused on global policy, multilateral engagement, system leadership, local capacity strengthening, interagency coordination and training, public-private engagement, and strategic communications. She managed an extensive global program portfolio; designed new international initiatives across the UN and NGO sectors to empower senior field leaders as well as the next generation of humanitarian leaders; created strategic partnerships with various think tanks and multilateral organizations; created mentoring programs and spearheaded new foreign service national and DEIA initiatives for the Bureau.
Ms. Beers was posted overseas for over fourteen years working on development programs and humanitarian crises across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. While with USAID, Ms. Beers led multiple large-scale interagency Disaster Assistance Response Teams responding to complex crises and natural disasters around the world, as well as Response Management Teams for Libya and Burma. Ms. Beers worked for USAID’s regional office in East Africa managing development and humanitarian programs and for a NGO based in Somalia, coordinating capacity strengthening and multi-sectoral programs for local organizations. She has also worked for several non-profits on democracy and citizenship initiatives.
Ms. Beers has previously served on the Board of Directors and Advisory Groups of numerous overseas organizations in her personal capacity. Ms. Beers holds a BA in International Affairs from George Washington University and a MPA from American University’s Key Executive Leadership Program. She is a graduate of the MIT Seminar XXI Program and the Foreign Service Institute’s National Security Executive Leadership Seminar. Ms. Beers has won numerous honor awards for her work overseas, including the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America group medal for her work on the U.S. Ebola Disaster Assistance Response Team. She often serves as guest lecturer at various universities on leadership and policy issues.