Midy Aponte
Senior Vice President
Midy is a senior vice president based in Denver. Her portfolio at Spitfire centers on a wide range of public interest issues, including income inequality, environmental protection, healthy equity/social determinants of health, racial justice, internet freedom and governance, and immigration and refugee resettlement. Her clients include global, national and state foundations such as the Ford Foundation, Environmental Defense Fund, Environmental Defense Fund Action Fund, Earthjustice, ClimateWorks, The Aspen Institute, Hispanics in Philanthropy and the Rose Community Foundation as well as mid-sized organizations such as CFLeads, Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition and Upwardly Global.
Midy is a communication strategist and generalist by trade – and a futurist at heart. Her career spans the public and private sectors and has often intersected with pressing policy and social issues affecting societal systems. She is nationally recognized for her ability to devise local, state and national campaign strategies that are creatively conceptualized, smartly implemented and sustainable. She is also a skilled brand strategist with a long track record of integrating executive visibility and social media-driven content-curation strategies to build brand awareness for organizations as they aim to influence national narratives on important issues. As a result, she is well respected among corporate representatives, political thought leaders, community advocates and next-generation influencers.
Prior to joining Spitfire, Midy served as the founding executive director of the American Latino Heritage Fund (ALHF) of the National Park Foundation. Her charge was to build a national nonprofit fund – ALHF – and inspire awareness of historic preservation, outdoor recreation and conservation and stewardship of national parks among American Latino audiences. She collaborated with the Obama administration, the Department of Interior and the National Park Service on several initiatives aimed at preserving American Latino history, and she provided counsel on the public launch of the National Park Service’s theme study “American Latinos and the Making of the United States.” The effort included work with the Public Broadcasting System documentary series “Latino Americans” and collaboration with the national coalition FRIENDS of the Latino Museum.
Midy’s work experience began in 1999 in Miami, FL where she worked for more than six years in public health communication for Golin, an international communication agency headquartered in Chicago. Here she was part of the team that created the nationally recognized youth-led anti-tobacco movement, truth. After moving to Washington, D.C. in 2004, she joined the reputation management firm, Walker Marchant, and gained valuable experience in litigation communication for Fortune 500 companies such as Eli Lilly, Tyco, Arbitron and Best Buy.
In 2009, she became a small business owner and founded her own consultancy, aimed at building content curation strategies for reaching Hispanic audiences through social media. Her clients included the National Council of La Raza, AARP, AOL Latino/Huffington Post, Centers for Disease Control and the Hispanic Association on Corporate Responsibility.