Bari Katz is a social justice educator, facilitator, and consultant based in New York, which sits on the ancestral and unceded homeland of the Lenape people, whose presence and stewardship of this land continues today. She holds that acknowledgment as part of her ongoing commitment to honoring the land, its history, and the communities who have always belonged to it. She has spent her career believing in and working toward liberation as something real, possible, and worth showing up for every single day, bringing that conviction into every room she enters and every relationship she builds.
At the heart of her work is a deep commitment to creating spaces where people feel genuinely seen, valued, and heard, and where individuals and organizations can develop the skills of dialogue, perspective taking, empathy, and deep listening that are essential to transforming the oppressive systems and ways of being we have all inherited.
Values at the Center
For Bari, social justice is a set of values she lives and works from, not a program or a curriculum to be delivered. Every engagement begins with the same grounding questions: What does it mean to show up with integrity here? Whose voices need to be centered? What does this community actually need? This values-led approach means her work looks and feels different depending on who she is with and what they are ready for. She doesn't arrive with a fixed playbook. She arrives in relationship.
How She Works
Bari is deeply relational, and she believes the quality of connection between people, and between a consultant and the communities she serves, is not separate from the work but central to it. She leads with intuition as much as expertise, trusting what she notices in a room: the energy, the silences, the moments when something quietly shifts. Her facilitation style is grounded and responsive, holding space for both the planned and the unexpected, because the most meaningful breakthroughs rarely arrive on schedule.
She holds process and outcome with equal care, knowing that how we do the work matters as much as what we produce. A beautifully designed curriculum can still miss the mark if the people it was meant to serve were excluded from creating it. A workshop can check every box and still leave people feeling unseen. Bari stays attentive to both, and her commitment to honoring the process is what makes the outcomes meaningful and lasting.
Her Work in the World
In recent years, Bari has worked closely with non-profit organizations, family foundations, and schools across the United States to help them move beyond mission statements and operationalize a genuine vision of social justice in ways that are meaningful and lasting. Her path into this work has been wide and varied. She co-founded a charter high school in Brooklyn, directed programs at the National Conference for Community and Justice, and traveled the country as a National Training Specialist for the Posse Foundation, supporting college access and leadership development for urban youth.
Since 2008, she has been a Sociology Professor at the City University of New York, teaching at Borough of Manhattan Community College and Medgar Evers College. Her courses in Race and Ethnicity, Oppression, and Introduction to Sociology reflect the same commitment she brings to all of her work: helping people understand the systems they live inside, creating opportunities for clarity seeking and healing, so that we can imagine something different together.
She holds a Master's in Sociology and two Bachelor's degrees in Politics and Sociology from NYU.
Outside of her formal work, Bari is doing some of the most important work of her life: home educating and raising her two daughters in the belief that another world is possible, and spending as much time in nature as she can, because the land has always been one of her greatest teachers. For her, liberation is not something that happens only in organizations or classrooms. It lives in how we raise our children, how we tend to ourselves, and how we stay in relationship with the earth.
