Barbara Margolis

Barbara Margolis (née Schneider) ‘51 (1929–2009) was a prisoners’ rights advocate and served as the official greeter of New York City during the administration of Mayor Ed Koch. At Simmons, she majored in Retailing. After marrying David Margolis, an industrialist and Chairman of Colt Industries, she moved to New York City in 1959. Margolis became a volunteer for Rikers Island (located in the Bronx), the city’s largest jail. She developed various programs to support inmates’ education and rehabilitation. Margolis is perhaps best known for creating Fresh Start in 1989, a program in which incarcerated individuals would receive culinary training from professional chefs.

According to her obituary published in The New York Times: “To those who knew her, Mrs. Margolis was so utterly at home at Rikers that it seemed simply as if she had always been on the island, which is home to one of the largest penal complexes in the world. . . . Perhaps the greatest sign of the esteem in which Mrs. Margolis was held came from the prisoners themselves. Frank Guzman, a Fresh Start alumnus who now earns his living as a trucker, recalled on Friday that inmates once stole her car from the Rikers parking lot. When they found out whose it was, they returned it at once.”

Photo courtesy of Simmons University Archives.