Mil Duncan

Mil Duncan is a Senior Fellow with Meridian. Prior to joining Meridian in this role, she served as Research Director of Meridian’s AGree project on food and agriculture and contributed to a groundbreaking report Meridian developed on climate change and food systems.

Mil is a sociologist who works on poverty and development. Throughout her career, she has conducted research in poor communities, including in the Appalachian coalfields, Mississippi Delta, and northern New England forestland, interviewing hundreds of people from all walks of life. The work was published as Worlds Apart: Politics and Poverty in Rural America (Yale University Press 2014). She also worked on a North Atlantic fisheries project, interviewing fishermen and others in Maine, Newfoundland, Iceland and Norway fishing communities in the late 1990s. She has served as Director of Community and Resource Development at the Ford Foundation, where she was responsible for community and environment grant making worldwide. Mil was also founding director of the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire and speaks and writes about rural poverty and development in America.

Mil lives in Santa Barbara, California next to three of her five grandchildren. She enjoys mountain hikes and long beach walks with her family and her labrador BusterBaby, and loves to embroider for her grandchildren.