met with community organizers, including Shel Trapp, who would become her partner in activism. Cincotta and Trapp founded the Organization for a Better Austin (OBA), and Cincotta served as various committee chairs before serving as president of OBA for two years. In 1972, Cincotta, Trapp, and Anne-Marie Douglas founded the National Training and Information Center (NTIC), and laid the foundations of National People's Action (NPA). Also in the early 1970s, Cincotta took a position with the Metropolitan Area Housing Alliance. This job allowed Cincotta to support her family after her husband died in 1976. Cincotta became known for her community organizing style. As the director of NPA, in addition to using formal channels of communication to reach politicians and bureaucrats, she organized "hits." "Hits" were confrontational protests outside of the offices, headquarters, and sometimes private residences of those in conflict with NPA. According to a statement by the NTIC, "At protests, Ms. Cincotta would alternately schmooze and threaten her targets, until they conceded the meetings she demanded." NPA led the national push for the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA), which Cincotta and Trapp helped draft. According to Senator William Proxmire, HMDA "would never have become a law but for the research and local organizing activity undertaken by NPA." The culmination of Cincotta's activism was the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977. Through her roles with the NTIC and NPA, Cincotta pushed for the passage of the CRA, and earned the appellation "Mother of the CRA." In 1977, President Jimmy Carter appointed Cincotta to the National Commission on Neighborhoods. In the late 1980s, she served on Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp's National Commission on Regulatory Barriers to Affordable Housing. Of Cincotta, Kemp said she was "one of the most substantive and knowledgeable leaders in low- and moderate-income housing that I have met in the country." In 1994, Cincotta became a member of Fannie Mae's Housing Impact Advisory Council, and in Chicago, she was on the Community Investment Advisory Council of the Federal Home Loan Bank. Cincotta is well known for her flamboyant activism. In 1970, to protest inadequate pest control in Austin, Cincotta led a group of 100 protesters to nail a rat to the ward alderman's office door. In 1980, Cincotta was responsible for placing Saturday Night Live's Land Shark above the entrance to the Federal Reserve Bank (to imply the bankers were loan sharks), and red tape