Hardy Vieux serves as Kids in Need of Defense (KIND)’s executive vice president and chief program officer. In that role, Hardy will help set the organization’s strategy, vision, and impact to support KIND’s mission of protecting the rights and well-being of children migrating alone in search of safety. Hardy will provide clear, actionable thought leadership regarding KIND’s evolving programming, global footprint, and agenda to broaden the organization’s reach and impact. He currently leads the organization’s efforts to combat exploitative child labor in partnership with for-profit corporations. Up until June 2024, Hardy served as KIND’s chief of staff. In that role, he aligned vision, strategy, and tactics to address the legal and psychosocial needs of migrant children.

Hardy also currently chairs Refugee Council USA’s board of directors, a coalition of 39 U.S. nongovernmental organizations representing a diverse group of nonprofits who advocate for and with refugees.

Prior to joining KIND in May 2021, Hardy served as the senior vice president, legal, at Human Rights First, where he led the organization’s pro bono asylum representation team and its impact litigation efforts, having started that work in 2018.

Since January 2017, Hardy has also served as a Towsley Foundation Policymaker in Residence at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. In that role, Hardy taught a fall semester, graduate-level human rights law seminar at the policy school. This semester, he is teaching at the University of Michigan’s law school.

In 2014, Hardy served as a policy fellow with Save the Children in Jordan, focusing on the problems of safeguarding and educating Syrian refugee children. Prior to living in the Middle East, he was in private legal practice focused on white collar criminal defense and complex civil trials. While in private practice, Hardy handled numerous pro bono matters, from litigation stemming from the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq to juvenile detention impact litigation and asylum representation.

Before moving to private practice, Hardy was a criminal appellate defense counsel in the United States Navy’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps, where he served as counsel on a death penalty case and national security matters, among others. Upon leaving the JAG Corps, Hardy served on the board of the National Institute of Military Justice, a nonprofit dedicated to the fair administration of justice in the armed forces. He started his legal career as a judicial law clerk in Denver federal district court, where he worked on the Oklahoma City bombing cases.

Hardy is a 1997 graduate of the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and Law School, where he served as a co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Michigan Journal of Race & Law. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in Public Policy Studies from Duke University, later serving on the board of visitors of the university’s public policy school.