Barbara’s expertise ranges across strategic planning, organization design and transformation, change management and leadership development. Her specialty is in designing and implementing large-scale, enterprise-wide programs, and developing high-performance teams to support nonprofits, their clients and the communities they serve in building capacity and capability while managing evolving visions and missions. She sees her work as an attempt to level the playing field for smaller advocacy, social justice, and community development organizations to grow, benefit and learn from the structures, systems, processes and best practices readily available to legacy organizations. Her industry experience encompasses academia, impact investment, criminal justice and healthcare.
Barbara is a trained urban planner with a Master’s degree in Urban Planning from Columbia University. While there, she conducted a six-month comparative study on the influence of early planning paradigms and legislation on the planning growth and development of colonial cities. Sites included Port-of-Spain, Trinidad (her hometown!), Accra, Ghana and Bogota, Columbia. Currently she is interested in issues of climate justice and sustainability, particularly as it relates to hurricanes, resilience and housing codes in the Caribbean; and disaster preparedness with an emphasis on business continuity for smaller scale organizations.
In the New York area, she has worked for and partnered with organizations, including: the Vera Institute of Justice, the Midtown Community Court, the Center for Court Innovation, New York University and Morris Height Health Center in the Bronx.