Aisha Mills

Aisha Mills has spent over 20 years advocating for underserved, under-represented and underresourced communities. She is a seasoned political strategist and policy analyst working to ensure that our democracy is responsive to, reflective of and led by the diverse communities that are the fabric of our Nation.

Ms. Mills has fought and won campaigns from the front lines of some of the most consequential movements of our time. She crafted and helped implement federal policy during the Obama administration as a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, the largest progressive think tank in the country. She won marriage equality in the District of Columbia as president of that campaign back in 2009. In addition, she has helped elect hundreds of people of color, LGBTQ people and women as President and Chief Executive Officer of the Victory Fund & Institute and as Executive Director of the Congressional Black Caucus PAC.

A nationally-respected voice on social justice and progressive politics, Ms. Mills frequently appears on MSNBC and CNN. She has published dozens of policy reports and cultural analyses on issues of race, gender and sexuality. Most recently, Ms. Mills hosted a daily prime-time current affairs show on the Black News Channel, which amplified the politics and policies that impact Black and Brown communities. In 2019, she was appointed a resident fellow at Harvard Kennedy School, where she taught a weekly seminar on the Nation’s shifting demographics and the rise of the “New American Majority” of people of color who will soon make up the majority of the population.

Ms. Mills serves on the boards of the National Institute for Reproductive Health Action Fund and the Newburgh Strategic Economic Development Advisory Council. The most southern Jersey girl you’ll ever meet, Ms. Mills was raised in New Jersey by her grandparents who left South Carolina in the 1950s as part of the great migration of African Americans fleeing the Jim Crow south for a better life. After spending two decades driving change at the federal level in Washington, D.C., she now resides in Newburgh with her partner, Melanie Collins, and three children.