Aisha Mills has spent more than twenty years advocating for underserved, under-represented and under-resourced communities, and she 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 in 2009, and she has helped to elect hundreds of people of color, LGBTQ people and women across the United States at the local, state, and federal level as president & CEO of the Victory Fund & Institute and executive director of the Congressional Black Caucus PAC.
Aisha’s advocacy extends beyond the campaign trail to media and academia. A nationally respected voice on social justice and progressive politics, she frequently appears on MSNBC and CNN. She has also published dozens of policy reports and cultural analyses on issues of race, gender and sexuality. Most recently, Aisha hosted a daily prime-time current affairs show on the Black News Channel which amplified the politics and policies impacting Black and Brown communities and profiled the transformational work of community leaders and small business owners across the country. The show was broadcast live from a studio Aisha built in Newburgh, bringing the national spotlight to the city.
In 2019, Aisha 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. Her course brought together diverse activists and political leaders from across the country to share their organizing expertise with students.
Aisha serves on the boards of the National Institute for Reproductive Health Action Fund and the Newburgh Strategic Economic Development Advisory Council. After spending two decades driving change at the federal level in Washington, DC, she now resides in Newburgh with her partner, Melanie Collins, and three children. If elected she will be the first, out, Black, lesbian to serve in the U.S. Congress.