Licensed in D.C., California, Minnesota

Decoding laws and designing new legal tools and legal frameworks at intersections with communities for fair ownership and benefit-sharing

Pacyinz’ work as a lifelong social justice professional has spanned several sectors and places. At this point of her career, she is an intersectional expert always learning new things and seeking to establish a new practice as a coop attorney. She comes from the perspectives of a French-born, Minnesotan-grown, Hmong/Asian/Southeast Asian American legal professional and poet. She has worked as a legal aid housing staff attorney, an Asian women’s shelter co-founder and executive director, a state agency fair housing and affordable housing policy staff, a family foundation grantmaking team member, a managing director for an environmental public law firm, an in-house counsel for a community-based health clinic, an executive director for a pro bono network focusing on global public interest intellectual property, a French tutor for kids, a poet, and a consultant. She has worked with poor people, refugees, immigrants, battered women, black neighborhoods, Native American reservations, rural farmers, medical professionals, legal professionals, international scientists, Inuit entrepreneurs, Caribbean entrepreneurs, elementary kids, cooperative stakeholders and their communities. As this point of her career, she has many lenses and many tools to problem-solve almost anything.

As an emerging coop attorney, she is diving hands-on into the coop sector from various lenses. She is actively engaged with/gently nudging the DC Coop Stakeholders’ Network’s Policy Committee in its first foray into publicly testifying at DC’s budget hearings to put cooperatives on the table as resilient community development models for post-pandemic recovery. She is also exploring becoming a worker-owner legal counsel and/or legal coop member at an emerging DC-based digital labor platform for self-employed and freelancers. She plans to practice coop law in CA, MN and DC where she is barred/has a pending admission application, has community ties, and would love to be able to contribute to intersectional and cross-community racial and economic equity and solidarity.