Carolyn S. Miles is President & Chief Executive Officer for Save the Children, the leading independent organization creating lasting change in the lives of more than 70 million children in need in the United States and 120 countries around the world.

Carolyn became the first woman to head Save the Children in September 2011, after joining the organization in 1998 and serving as its Chief Operating Officer for the past seven years. She has traveled to Save the Children’s field operations in nearly 50 countries, and during her tenure as COO Save the Children doubled the number of children it reaches with food, educational, and other programs, and helped grow the organization’s budget – 90 percent of which goes directly to programs serving children – from $140 million to more than $550 million.

As CEO, Carolyn has called attention to the urgent need for Save the Children and other organizations – public, private, nonprofit and for-profit – to cooperate and share their resources and expertise for the benefit of the world’s children. She has also emphasized the need to use social media and new technology to extend the organization’s reach and fully engage with Save the Children’s employees, volunteers, beneficiaries, donors, partners and others around the world. To this end, she launched her own blog, “Logging Miles,” and is committed to employing social media to extend Save the Children’s reach, building on such successes as its Twitter-based campaign that reached nearly 900 million people to raise awareness of the child hunger crisis in East Africa. She can also be found on Twitter @carolynsave.

Merging an Entrepreneurial Spirit with a Commitment to the World’s Children

Initially, Carolyn worked in the private sector after earning her M.B.A. from the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, on whose board she now sits. She worked for American Express in Hong Kong, and subsequently partnered to start a successful chain of coffee shops there as an entrepreneur.

During her years in Asia, she came face-to-face with the endemic deprivation faced by millions of children. Moved by the dramatic juxtaposition of this poverty with the opportunities available to her own children, she dedicated herself to providing the world’s children with better opportunities in life.

Carolyn is a member of the Board of Directors of Blackbaud, a major supplier of nonprofit software and is the chair of the Nominations/Governance Committee. She also serves on the Board of the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. Carolyn received an M.B.A. from the Darden School and a B.A. from Bucknell University.

Follow us on Twitter and Facebook, and learn more about us at www.savethechildren.org.