Mario Cooper is a long-term survivor of HIV and a longtime AIDS and gay-rights activist.

Cooper served as the Convention Manager for the 1992 Democratic National Convention in New York. Cooper managed a staff of more than 200 and a budget of more than $12 million. He also served on President Carter's advance team and was responsible for the President's domestic and foreign travel.

He was chair of the AIDS Action Council board and a board member of the Gay Men's Health Crisis and the Harvard AIDS Institute. In 1994, he began organizing the Leading for Life Campaign, a coalition of influential black academics, advocates and other movers and shakers, to raise awareness of the burgeoning HIV epidemic in the African-American community.

After being turned away by such black civil-rights bulwarks as the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), he used his Clinton contacts to win the support of the nation's two leading African-American health officials, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. David Satcher and Dr. Helene Gayle, the head of the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)'s HIV/AIDS division.

Launched at the Harvard AIDS Institute in February 1996 to much media fanfare, Leading for Life is widely viewed as the spark that lit the prairie fire of AIDS awareness and advocacy in the African-American community.