Maria Foscarinis is the founder and Executive Director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty (NLCHP), where she is a nationally recognized leader of the efforts to end homelessness through impact litigation, policy advocacy, and public education. After graduating from Columbia Law in 1981, where she was Notes and Comments editor of the Law Review, she clerked for Judge Amalya L. Kearse on the Second Circuit and worked as a litigation associate at Sullivan & Cromwell. She then directed the Washington office for the National Coalition for the Homeless before founding the NLCHP in 1989.
Ms. Foscarinis led the design and lobbied for the enactment of the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, the first major federal legislation addressing homelessness. She has testified before Congress and has written, lectured, interviewed, and spoken widely on legal and policy issues affecting homeless persons, earning frequent quotations in print and electronic media. During her time as the leader of the NLCHP, she has focused her attention on the right of homeless children to education, the problems attendant to criminalizing homelessness, international human rights law, and the ethical issues facing advocates for change in homelessness law and policy.