Tune in to Rachel's show, "I Am Not Creative" on DO Radio from 23 February.

"Rachel made me a better judge"

Rachel G. Barnard is a creative and civic strategist, speaker, and facilitator who uses creativity to help people show up across difference—with more humanity, imagination, and play.

She is the founder of Young New Yorkers (YNY), where she created NYC’s first arts-based Alternative to Incarceration program. Her decade-plus leadership saw the initiative support over 1,400 young people to avoid jail and exit the criminal legal system through restorative, arts-based programming.

Participant-led “courtroom exhibitions” helped shift sentencing cultures across the city. As Judge Calabrese put it: “Rachel made me a better judge.”

Today, Rachel continues this work through her newsletter Creative Civility and her design-research project Objects of Civility—which explores how physical tools support connection between adversarial groups. The project received the 2024 Independent Projects Grant from The Architectural League of New York and the New York State Council on the Arts.

She designs and facilitates creative practices that support direct service and social justice workers in processing secondary trauma—reconnecting them to their joy and inner wisdom.

A former architect in New York and Australia, Rachel served as NYC’s Public Artist in Residence at the Department of Probation—bringing art and design into spaces of justice and repair.

Listen to Rachel on DO Radio from 23 February or catch her episodes in the DO Radio Archive.