Karin Spencer

For 25 years, Karin Spencer has built a reputation in Albany as one of the state's most effective behind-the-scenes advocates — the kind of professional, one nominator wrote, who works "building coalitions, navigating legislative complexity, shaping strategy, and turning seemingly impossible goals into reality." As Founder and Principal of the boutique lobbying firm Spencer Strategic Solutions, Spencer has driven major reforms in mental health parity and telehealth reimbursement, and spent a decade fighting for — and ultimately winning — licensure and scope-of-practice modernization for New York's athletic trainers, a fight her clients say she pursued "tirelessly through legislative sessions, stakeholder negotiations, coalition building, and countless setbacks." She has also secured funding for their concussion education programming.

Spencer has secured millions of dollars for at-risk youth programming. She also created, launched, and continuously secures funding for a nationally recognized, ongoing veteran's mental health training initiative. Expanding her firm's footprint into the voting rights arena, Spencer was recently pivotal in the passage of a critical polling place extender bill. In community safety, she has navigated the passage of landmark gun violence prevention laws, including firearm merchant category codes, safe storage requirements, a ban on ghost guns, and, most recently, Francesco's Law. This year, she helped pull the Maternal Health, Dignity, and Consent Act back from what one nominator called "effectively dead on arrival," steering it to Senate passage and to the brink of Assembly passage before session ended — one of several fights peers describe her tackling with what one called "spirited warmth and fundamental integrity."

Beyond the Capitol, Spencer channels the same persistence into equine welfare: she founded HORSEPWR.org, New York's only equine welfare policy organization, which has banned the sale or transfer of slaughter-bound horses, delivered emergency pandemic funding to barns across the nation, and inspired similar legislative efforts in Texas, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. "She is a powerhouse lobbyist in every sense," one colleague wrote in nominating her — an assessment echoed across the seven peers who wrote in on her behalf.