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Barbara can't seem to fit into any particular box. Her multi-passionate spirit has a number of identities: from Licensed Master Social Worker (LMSW) and social impact strategist to writer, activist and advisor. Her passions include social and racial justice, mental health and community care, two generational approaches, and social innovation. Barbara received her master's degree in social work with a concentration in advanced social policy from New York University. She has spent 15 years working in, supervising and building home and community-based programs for at-risk youth and families. She’s spoken internationally on the intersection of social justice and mental health, and has played a number of roles from practitioner and advocate, to leader and organizer. In her spare time, Barbara has provided mentorship, advisory and coaching to women and girls.

Barbara’s activism has taken many forms. Her insights pertaining to feminism, mental health, and entrepreneurship have been featured in radio and published on sites such as Teen Vogue, HuffPost, Bustle, Elite Daily, and Thought Catalog. In 2017, Barbara was a volunteer marshal at the Women's March in D.C. She also led a petition for her high school to change their sexual assault policies. With over 700 signatures and garnered media attention, the school later enhanced their school policies.

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Barbara has also submitted testimony to New York City Council advocating for accessible community-based mental health care and was a key advocate in New York State expanding Children and Family Treatment and Support Services (CFTSS) to include support groups for caregivers and collaterals (siblings, educators, etc).

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In 2012, Barbara co-founded Project Bond, an organization focused on parent-child attachment and healthy relationships, in response to witnessing the unique needs of foster and adoptive families going unmet. In 2017, Barbara helped found Families Thriving at University Settlement Society of New York (USS), America’s first settlement house, through $1.33 million seed funding from the Manhattan District Attorney Office’s Criminal Justice Investment Initiative to address mass incarceration. Families Thriving partners with individuals, families, and community stakeholders to provide community care including multi-tiered mental health and wellness supports. More than 90% of graduating families report experiencing positive change after having been involved. As Director of Families Thriving at USS, Barbara’s work has entailed ground up program design and staffing, strategic planning, implementation, development of community partnerships, clinical oversight, and outcome measurement.

Over the past two years, Barbara has focused on developing community wellness initiatives and now serves as the Director of Community Wellness Initiatives at University Settlement. This work has included an initiative to embed mental health mental health and social emotional supports into 17 youth development sites across the Lower East Side and Brooklyn, providing Crisis Debriefing in response to community violence, and securing a partnership with NYC Community School District 1 and Trinity Church Wall Street to expand Families Thriving into all 19 District 1 schools. She’s also co-created and launched Connection Circles, a group processing model in response to Covid and social and racial injustice.

As community mental health needs have risen across New York City over the last few years, institutions including the NYC Office of School Health, the New York State Coalition for Children’s Behavioral Health, and the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene have increasingly turned to Barbara as a thought partner to strategize effective ways to respond. She was invited to join NYC Deputy Mayor Williams-Isom’s Child and Family Mental Health Taskforce and currently serves on Trinity Church Wall Street’s Neighborhood Council, a group of community stakeholders gathered to advise grantmaking and advocacy strategy for Lower Manhattan.

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Barbara is daring greatly in New York City where she thrives on creating, innovating and collaborating with others to dismantle any and all barriers keeping folks from accessing their own great power and potential.