Our Team

Ann Marie Council, JD | Founding Partner and Mental Health Policy Advisor

Ann Marie Council spent 25 years as a Senior Deputy City Attorney for the City of San Diego, working across nearly every unit in the office, from criminal prosecution and appellate work to gun violence response and probate conservatorships. Over time, her practice increasingly centered on a question that the legal system rarely asks: what happens to the people who keep showing up in the emergency rooms and criminal courts due to mental health issues, and how do we actually help them?

That question led her to develop and lead the City Attorney's LIFT Program. LIFT was LIFT was a groundbreaking initiative that brought together EMS, law enforcement, homeless outreach, and local nonprofit medical teams to give San Diego's first responders a legal pathway to access treatment for the city's most vulnerable residents.. The program successfully initiated over 20 probate conservatorships, resulting in a more than 90 percent reduction in associated 911 calls. She co-authored and co-managed a $3 million Proposition 47 grant supporting the SMART program, which provided housing, cognitive treatment, and drug treatment to individuals facing jail terms. She also developed the protocols for San Diego's Gun Violence Restraining Order unit, co-authored the city's municipal code banning novel synthetic drugs, and created the California Drug Matrix, a document categorizing over 250 controlled substances now used by prosecutors and law enforcement statewide and updated annually since 2015.

Her legislative reach extends beyond San Diego. In the 2025 session alone, proposals she wrote served as partial basis for four California bills: Senate Bills 27, 331, and 367, and Assembly Bill 1105.

Ann Marie's published work spans academic legal scholarship, policy analysis, and accessible public writing. Her recent publications on CARE Court and Welfare and Institutions Code Section 5200 have informed coverage in the Los Angeles Times and LAist, and have shaped conversations at the Steinberg Institute. She has presented before the League of California Cities, the FBI National Academy for Law Enforcement, and the California Fire, EMS, and Disaster Conference, among others.

At Quarter Turn Strategies, she focuses on the question of what the law allows versus what systems actually do. She identifies underutilized legal pathways, highlights implementation gaps, and translates complex mental health law into actionable guidance for legislators, local governments, and the professionals who serve people in crisis.

She holds a JD, magna cum laude, from California Western School of Law and a BA in Sociology from UC San Diego.

Wendy Moore | Founding Partner and Grant Development Advisor

Wendy Moore has spent more than two decades doing something that sounds simple but is anything but: getting resources for the people and organizations that protect everyone else. Her career has been built around first responders, the firefighters, paramedics, and emergency personnel who run toward danger so the rest of us don't have to, and making sure they have the organizational and financial infrastructure to do that work effectively.

 As Executive Director of the San Diego Fire-Rescue Foundation since 2010, she has led fundraising campaigns, secured grants of up to $700,000, built corporate partnerships, and launched events that netted as much as $150,000 in their inaugural year. Her consulting practice, W. Moore Consulting, has extended that reach across California and beyond, helping fire foundations in Orange County, Contra Costa County, and other jurisdictions launch and grow their own development programs.

 What the numbers don't capture is the combination of strategic intelligence, relentless energy, and genuine passion for public safety that colleagues across her career have described as contagious. She brings the same qualities to every engagement, whether she is managing a board, writing a grant, orchestrating a major event, or building a corporate partnership from a cold conversation to a five-figure commitment.

 At Quarter Turn Strategies, Wendy provides the operational and development expertise that turns policy work into sustainable programs. She holds a Professional Certificate in Nonprofit Management from the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy and a certificate in The Equity Journey from the Nonprofit Leadership Alliance. She is a member of the Grant Professionals Association and the Association of Fundraising Professionals.

Collaborators

Aaron Meyer, MD | Co-Author, Co-Presenter, and Research Contributor

Aaron Meyer is a board-certified psychiatrist and family medicine physician whose career has been built around the populations that health systems most often fail: people with serious mental illness, substance use disorders, and complex social needs who cycle through emergency rooms, jails, and crisis services without ever receiving real care.

He serves as a Health Sciences Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UC San Diego, where his clinical, teaching, and research work focuses on co-occurring disorders, conservatorships, and the intersection of psychiatric care with emergency and legal systems. He was the lead clinical witness before the California State Senate Health Committee on Senate Bill 43, one of the most significant reforms to California's mental health law in decades, and has presented his work before the American Psychiatric Association, the California Association of LPS Hearing Officers, and numerous academic and clinical audiences.

He is the President of the San Diego Psychiatric Society and the current Governmental Affairs Committee Chair of the California State Association of Psychiatrists, where he helps shape the policy environment that governs psychiatric care statewide.

His collaboration with Quarter Turn Strategies brings deep clinical expertise to research and publications at the intersection of mental health law, emergency response, and systems reform.

Jordan Lowery, JD | Co-Author, Co-Presenter, and Research Contributor

Jordan Lowery brings something rare to the work of mental health policy reform: she has handled it from multiple angles in the field. As a Deputy City Attorney for the City of Sacramento, she currently serves as counsel to public safety departments and as a primary legal resource for city departments working with people experiencing homelessness. Before that, at the County of Shasta, she managed conservatorship hearings and trials, CARE Court implementation, and felony cases, giving her hands-on experience with the legal machinery that most policy discussions only theorize about.

She also serves as an Adjunct Professor at UC Davis School of Law, where she brings that practical expertise into the classroom and contributes to the next generation of attorneys who will navigate these systems.

Her collaboration with Quarter Turn Strategies reflects a shared conviction that the gap between mental health law on paper and mental health law in practice is where the real work happens.

Jordan earned her JD from the UC Irvine School of Law and her Bachelor of Arts from UC Davis.

Anne Jensen | Co-Author and Research Contributor

Anne Jensen served as a paramedic in the City of San Diego EMS system for twenty years and was part of the early national development of Community Paramedicine in the United States.

In 2011, she led the implementation of one of the first urban Community Paramedicine programs, which remains in operation today and received federal recognition for innovation in care delivery. She continues to work with communities across the country on program development, implementation, and field integration.

She holds a Bachelor of Science in Applied Physics.