Melinda Miles

Melinda Miles is a cultural anthropologist who has worked in Haiti for almost twenty-five years. An expert on human rights, climate change, and disaster response, Miles is the coordinator of the Haiti Response Coalition, a cross-sector platform for coordination, advocacy, and joint action. She is also the Director of Learning and Accountability at Lamp Lifeboat Ladder, a global refugee resettlement program that supports survivors of torture, sexual violence, and trauma, where her focus is on designing structures and processes to operationalize a survivor-led approach. Miles works to disrupt systems that perpetuate poverty and injustice by building change that is rooted in human rights and self-determination for the Haitian people.  

Miles is a coalition-builder who brings together diverse stakeholders and works to bridge between movements in Haiti and international support.  From 2015-2021, Miles coordinated the Haiti Takes Root/Ayiti Vèt program and built a platform of 65 organizations working across sectors to respond to climate change and a greener Haiti. Working with Haiti’s Ministries of Agriculture and Environment and the World Bank, she planned and oversaw a four-watershed participatory planning process for a resilient landscape program that included ecosystem-based adaptation and payment for ecosystem services as approaches to protect coastal mangroves and restore local water sources.  Miles coordinated two charcoal studies, both at the national level and focused on the northern city of Cap-Haitien.

Miles co-founded the Haiti Response Coalition after the earthquake in 2010 and revived it at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the aftermath of both January 12 and the August 2021 earthquakes, she worked with a team of Haitian mobilizers to provide direct aid to survivors while coordinating with over 50 organizations and at same time supported independent journalists investigating post-disaster conditions and humanitarian aid. In June 2022, Miles organized the Beyond Lessons Learned conference with Haiti Development Institute in Les Cayes. The event brought together 220 local stakeholders from across the Grand Sud to launch a grassroots national disaster preparedness and response platform.

As Executive in Charge of Production for the award-winning film “The Uncondemned”, Miles’s team chronicled the first time rape was prosecuted as a war crime during the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. As Program Director at TransAfrica Forum, she was part of a small team in charge of the U.S National Memorial for Nelson Mandela. Today, Miles is the director of Manifest Haiti, a consulting team of experts with decades of experience in Haiti. Current and former clients include: PRODEV Foundation, UN Foundation - Clean Cooking Alliance, US Forestry Service, Vincentian Family Haiti Initiative, the Artists Institute, and the Environmental Law Institute.