Mike Smith was born and raised in Connecticut. He received his BA from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, and moved to the Bay Area in 1984 to earn his MBA from Stanford University. For the last ten years, Mike has been Executive Director of the AIDS Emergency Fund & Breast Cancer Emergency Fund, sister agencies that annually help more than 3,000 people disabled by HIV/AIDS or breast cancer pay their bills while too sick to work. Mike is the co-founder of the AIDS Memorial Quilt and served as managing director there from 1987 to 1989. He left the Bay Area briefly in the late 1990s to run the LGBT Community Center of Colorado where he led the effort to pass domestic partnership and transgender rights legislation in 2002. He was a Castro neighborhood resident for more than 20 years before recently moving to SoMa.