“Save the Children’s Saving Newborn Lives project hired Mia as a consultant to support the research and writing on a report. It was a complex project with moving deadlines, shifting formats and purposes, and multiple players. She managed all of these challenges with grace and professionalism. Above all, her contributions to writing the report were so excellent that we extended her contract to support on other elements of the report that needed to be done. This task included writing the executive summary as well as interviewing and documenting the stories of families for the report. Mia takes great effort to listen to her clients requests to ensure she is able to deliver on the agreed objectives and products. I would highly recommend Mia for research, writing and communication support.”
— Mary Kinney, Technical Advisor at Save the Children USA and PhD candidate
“Since our first meeting with Mia I was impressed with her enthusiasm for and commitment to newborn health. PCI hired Mia to lead the writing and development of a collaborative technical brief on family participation in the care of the inpatient newborn. At each point along the way, from a detailed outline, to combining and incorporating comments from a wide variety of technical experts around the world, Mia delivered an exceptional product that demonstrated her technical writing skills as well as her familiarity with newborn health literature and themes.
In addition to Mia’s talents, she is highly professional, personable and engaging, and was able to navigate the project’s shifting timelines and wide-ranging input with ease. I am pleased to have such a strong writer with an excellent grasp of newborn health among my contacts, and hope we have many opportunities to work with her in the future.”
— Judith Robb-McCord, Vice President, Technical Leadership and Support at Project Concern International (PCI) and Director of USAID’s Every Preemie– SCALE program
“Experienced, exceptional, and professional are three words I would use to describe Mia. Her resume alone speaks for itself! She has a wide array of professional experiences in writing, editing, and community programs making her ideal for assisting us with the development of our weight loss program. She critically analyzed and synthesized the results of our needs assessment and CDC’s Diabetes Prevention Program to devise clear and succinct programmatic recommendations. Mia went beyond our expectations to provide key opportunities for enhanced program development. Collectively, her efforts helped us significantly expedite the development of our weight loss program making it a cutting-edge, health promotion program.
Throughout the process, working with Mia was such a joy! I am so thankful to have had the opportunity to work with her and hope I can work with her again soon. I would strongly recommend her for any project that requires strong critical thinking and communication skills to provide exceptional results!”
—–John Haubenstricker, PhD candidate, MS, RD, CSSD, EP-C, Former Supervisor
“I have had the wonderful experience of working with Mia. I found Mia to be exceptional at understanding the scope of each task very rapidly. She came onto our project after it was well underway but right when we were working intensively to develop our communication strategy, materials and intended platforms. Mia listened, engaged, and rapidly stimulated development of our thinking, packaging the concepts into a succinct title that captured our campaign goal perfectly! It was catchy, simple, direct, and yet versatile enough for many differing audiences.
Her scientific understanding and programmatic experience in Nutritional Sciences, Maternal Child Health, and Global Health Programs, made that quickness of both understanding our goals and running forward in concept development and application astounding. In addition to capturing the intent perfectly in a campaign theme and title, she then quickly moved into the pragmatic building blocks of specific communication pieces from succinct text for posters, social media posting, to more detailed information pieces for website pages. She created corresponding concepts and pieces for looping audio-visual presentation in our service delivery sites. She was exceptional at keeping in tight coordination with the team, frequently asking questions to be sure she was on track as she guided the process.
In summary, Mia’s strength of knowledge in Nutrition and Health combined with her quick understanding of project needs and her unique creativity and knowledge of effective communication strategies, makes for a powerful combination of talent she brings to deliver above and beyond results!”
—– Dr. Kathleen Merchant, Former consultancy supervisor
“Save the Children’s Department of Global Health hired Mia to support its knowledge management team. I learned of her work through the enthusiastic endorsement of her supervisor and asked her to support the completion and rollout of the redesigned Healthy Newborn Network, a website that the Saving Newborn Lives project manages on behalf of 120 partner organizations. Mia oversaw the completion of the content development, which required tracking the development of technical content and getting it reviewed and approved by a large number of stakeholders. She also developed and implemented an integrated marketing plan to promote the relaunch, including communicating with the partner network, designing an event, writing a brochure and other collateral, and producing a short video. I can’t emphasize enough what a relief it was to be able to hand this project off to Mia and know she would plan it appropriately, seek and respond to the inputs with tact and sensitivity, and then implement it according to plan. As a result, we completed the website redesign on time, tested it, and launched it without a hitch. I hope we’ll be able to work with Mia in the future when we need a creative and resourceful project manager.”
—– John Engels, former Director of Advocacy, Communications & Knowledge Management at Saving Newborn Lives Program, Save the Children USA
“I hired Mia a couple of years ago to collaborate with me on a range of external and internal communications projects for the Department of Global Health. I was impressed with her ability to build relationships, manage projects, and learn quickly about new technical areas. It was evident to me that she cared about our mission and was willing to put in extra time and revisions to make us happy.”
Mia Durairaj 