About

Barbara Gross, Equity Program Specialist

Barbara Gross has decades of experience as a community organizer, racial justice facilitator, coach, and trainer.  She has provided strategic support and capacity-building to education justice organizing groups, coalitions, and unions organizing for anti racist, culturally responsive, and equitable schools in NYC and across the country. 

Most recently, as Deputy Director of the Education Justice Research and Organizing Collaborative (EJROC), of the NYU Metro Center, Barbara co-designed and co-led “From Integration to Antiracism (FIAR),” a six month training and coaching series for public school parents, now known as “Building Equity Together (BET).” She has expertise and sees great value in facilitating affinity spaces where people can share their lived experiences with one another and explore the development of their own racial identities in order to together build strong multiracial, multiethnic, and multiclass communities. 

Before NYU, Barbara served as a principal associate in Community Organizing and Engagement at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform (AISR) where she helped to found the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools (AROS), a national network of youth, community organizing groups and labor unions, joining forces in the fight for equity and high quality public schools for all. 

She was co-founder and co-director of the South Bronx parent organizing group, Mothers on the Move (MOM), and before that an adult literacy teacher in a Freiren-based adult learning program in the Bronx. Her community organizing career began a long time ago at Philadelphia ACORN.

Barbara has four (now adult) children and has years of  experience as a NYC public school parent as well as a private school parent of children with special needs. She has a B.S in Education and Social Policy from Cornell University.