ABOUT

Barbara Linder founded Right at Home as an organic extension of her professional and family life.

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After a successful career in financial services designing centralized customer service centers and overseeing large systems mergers and integrations, she left the field to pursue more personally and deeply felt interests.

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In 2007, she transitioned to a leadership role at St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital (SLR) with responsibility for two psychiatric emergency rooms, 3 acute inpatient units, adult and child outpatient clinics, a nascent faculty physician practice and a start-up care management department. She fell in love with community psychiatry and became a fierce advocate for this underserved population.

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5 years later, she was recruited by New York Presbyterian Hospital (NYP) to be the Director of Behavioral Health across its Service Line. There she worked directly with the current Vice Chairman of the Board of Trustees, the Behavioral Health Chairs of both Columbia and Cornell medical colleges, and reported to the Chief Medical Officer. Her responsibilities included overseeing mental health services across 7 campuses; building centers of excellence in Autism and the Developing Brain on NYP’s dedicated psychiatric hospital in White Plains; creating a multi-campus research and clinical practice in the treatment of Youth Anxiety, while nurturing a culture of deep concern for the welfare of the mentally ill and underrepresented.

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During her years at SLR and NYP she was often asked to help individuals and families struggling to find appropriate, affordable, accessible care for their loved ones. Among the most challenging were aging people without the resources or capacity to gain access to the services, care, and environments in which they could thrive. This became very personal when a neighbor knocked on her door to say goodbye because their coop had started eviction proceedings as a result of his hoarding.

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Feeling this was unjust, Barbara rallied her resources, got her Mobile Crisis Team to examine her neighbor’s leg ulcer, took him to the hospital, engaged their coop president to see how they could all work together to make her neighbor’s apartment habitable, to take care of his mental health needs and to determine his financial capacity to continue to live in his home and age with dignity. With a clean, renovated apartment and a live in aide, this neighbor spent the last 5 years of his life at home, where he died in home hospice holding the hand of the wonderful woman who took care of him.

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That abbreviated story became a labor of love and a guide star for Barbara who went on to help others find the best ways to continue to live at home as they faced the ongoing needs of aging bodies and minds. With her team, she launched Right at Home, a sliding scale organization offering affordable and pro bono services to individuals and families in need of help.