Families USA

Sinsi Hernández-Cancio is the Director of Health Equity at Families USA, where she focuses on expanding and strengthening the organization's ability to enable, enhance, and elevate health care advocacy and activism in communities of color across the nation. She is continuing the group's work to build a thriving and vocal health equity movement that will protect the gains of the health care law while ensuring maximum equity in its implementation.

Ms. Hernández-Cancio has worked in the field of health policy for a decade and has a longstanding commitment to fighting for the rights of people of color, especially vulnerable women and children. Before joining Families USA, she worked as a women's human and civil rights lawyer. She first became deeply involved in issues of health care and health disparities when she served as Health and Human Services advisor for two Puerto Rico Governors at their Washington, D.C., offices. She later worked on health policy for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), focusing mostly on long-term care, Puerto Rico issues, health disparities, and health reform. During the effort to pass health reform, she was the National Campaign Coordinator for SEIU's Healthcare Equality Project, where she worked with many coalition partners to ensure that health equity was part of the national debate and that health disparities were addressed. Her first job after graduating was as a Georgetown Women's Law and Public Policy Fellow at the Women's Rights Project of Human Rights Watch.

Ms. Hernández-Cancio was born in Puerto Rico and grew up in both Puerto Rico and western Massachusetts. She earned an A.B. from Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and she earned her J.D. from New York University School of Law, where she was a Hays Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Fellow and earned a Vanderbilt medal.