Lucy Quacinella has worked as a lawyer in California for over 20 years; her areas of expertise include health and other social and economic human rights affecting working poor families with children and other low-income people. She founded Multiforum Advocacy Solutions (MAS) in 2000.
After receiving her law degree from UC Davis in 1981, Quacinella worked with Legal Services of Northern California, providing community legal education, conducting administrative advocacy and representing clients in court in social justice cases. From 1995 to 1998, as staff attorney at the Western Center on Law and Poverty’s Sacramento office, she successfully sponsored major health care legislation benefiting low-income people and acted as lead counsel in statewide action suits to preserve MediCal prenatal care benefits. In 1994 Ms. Quacinella received a year-long Fulbright grant to participate with Namibian legal experts in establishing the country’s Human Rights and Documentation Centre (HRDC), repeal apartheid-era legislation and draft comprehensive new laws in the area of child welfare. Quacinella and her Namibian colleagues also designed and taught seminars on due process, human rights and economic development for educators, prison and police personnel and remote rural communities.
In 2006, Quacinella returned to Africa as a legal consultant with Fulbright’s Senior Specialist program. Working in Rwanda with law schools and the NGO, Women’s Equity in Access to Care and Treatment (WE-ACTx), she helped to design and integrate community legal education and advocacy programs into health and mental health services for HIV-positive women survivors of the 1994 Rwanda genocide and rape. Quacinella provides on-going technical assistance to the Legal Project Director in Kigali, combining long-distance communication with periodic on-site visits. |
