Elizabeth Kucinich

Early life

Born Elizabeth Jane Harper, daughter of Graham Harper and Julia Massey (divorced), she was brought up in North Ockendon in the London Borough of Havering, England. She attended Coopers' Company and Coborn School in Upminster from 1989–96. According to her mother, as a girl Kucinich was always interested in human rights and the environment and circulated petitions on animal rights at school and lobbied Parliament from the age of 14 years. After leaving school, she traveled alone to India for six months. There she went to Agra and volunteered at one of Mother Teresa's homes for India's poorest children. After completing her university education in 2002, Kucinich lived in Tanzania for 16 months where she worked with Voluntary Services Overseas on education and HIV prevention programmes.

Kucinich holds a BAin Religions Studies and Theology, an MA in International Conflict Analysis from the University of Kent, UK and has completed vocational training in core Skills in U.N. Human Rights fieldwork, SPHERE: implementation training in Minimum Standards in Disaster Response, and the Child Protection Certificate. In alignment with her core commitments, she also has a certificate in Peace and Reconciliation Studies from Coventry University, UK

Career

In 2005, after working with rural and urban poor in India and Tanzania, Kucinich moved to the USA to organise the first international conference on monetary reform for the American Monetary Institute. She has previously been the Director of Policy at the Center for Food Safety and the government affairs director for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) and a congressional liaison for former President of the United Nations General Assembly.

In December 2012 she launched a career in selling Real Estate. "Real estate is a longtime passion," she said.

Kucinich was on the board of directors of several organisations, including Sean Penn's Haitian relief organisation, J/P HRO and is on the board of the Rodale Institute; In 2013 she became a Director of Policy with the Center for Food Safety a, " ... national non-profit public interest and environmental advocacy organization working to protect human health and the environment by curbing the use of harmful food production technologies and by promoting organic and other forms of sustainable agriculture" and joined the board of directors of UNRWA USA in October 2014.

Kucinich is executive producer of GMO OMG, which "arguably does for genetically modified organisms what Al Gore’s 2006 Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth did for climate change. Kucinich is also producer of the documentary "Hot Water" which reveals radioactive contamination of ground water across the United States.

She listed as Professor Elizabeth Kucinich on the VC's Advisory Group at Coventry University.

Kucinich's appearance has been noted in the media. Vanity Fair magazine named Elizabeth Kucinich among the nation's "best dressed" political wives and Cleveland Magazine pegged her as "Cleveland's most interesting". while the Washington Post described Kucinich as "if not a national obsession, then certainly a treasured District landmark" who as "an excellent example of genetics could easily have made it in the other Hollywood."

Personal life

Recently arrived from England she visited the office of Congressman Dennis Kucinich with her boss from the American Monetary Institute. on 4 May 2005. They have described this initial interaction as "soul recognition".

They met for the second time at a policy event later that month in New Mexico and decided to get married; three months later, on 21 August 2005 in Cleveland, Ohio, they did so. It was Elizabeth's first marriage and Dennis's third. Dennis is 31 years her senior.