Mike Smith has served as executive director of the AIDS Emergency Fund and Breast Cancer Emergency Fund (AEF & BCEF) since 2002. The two agencies annually help more than 2,500 people disabled by HIV/AIDS or in treatment for breast cancer to manage the financial stress of illness and pay their bills if too sick to work. Smith is the co-founder of the NAMES PROJECT AIDS Memorial Quilt and served as managing director there from 1987 to 1989. During his tenure, the quilt grew from an idea to a work containing more than 15,000 memorial panels from twenty countries. In 1989, the organization was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and the film about the quilt, Common Threads, received the Academy Award for best documentary. He returned to the NAMES Project in 1996 to produce the last full-scale display of the Quilt in Washington DC that year. Smith was also executive director of the LGBT Community Center of Colorado from 1997 to 2001 and chaired Denver Mayor Wellington Webb’s LGBT Advisory Council that drafted and advocated for domestic partner rights and transgender rights legislation that became law in 2002.
Mike’s undergraduate degree is from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He received his MBA from Stanford University Graduate School of Business.
