Mia Scharphie is a designer who combines landscape architecture and research advocacy and writing. Her work focuses on the intersection of design,social impact and entrepreneurship.

Passionate about the potential of design to catalyze social change, in 2012 Mia cofoundedProactive Practices, a research collaborative that identifies and publicizes emerging business models socially entrepreneurial design. The Proactive Practices team has spoken and run workshops across the country, empowering designers to pursue social impact work strategically. Mia recently served as the Northeastern University Architecture Department’s first fellow, investigating emerging models of innovative design practice, and she is the founder of Build Yourself+, a workshop that teaches action-based empowerment skills to female designers.

Mia has worked as a designer for the landscape architecture firm GroundView, and the SWA Group on projects of multiple scales, with a particular focus on plants and biodiversity. She received her master in landscape architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and her undergraduate degree cum laude in Urban Studies from Brown University. Mia has spoken extensively, has been an invited speaker at conferences of the Association of Community Designers, Structures for Inclusion, and A Better World by Design. Mis also curates the ‘Creative Somerville Series” a speaker series in the city of Somerville, focused on creatives and entrepreneurs, and is the design partner for Black Trumpet, a pop up dinner club in Boston. Her writings on issues of equity in design have been published in the Christian Science Monitor and GOOD.