Barbara is an oral historian. She is a former Director of the Terrence Higgins Trust, former co-founder and facilitator of the bygone Positive Youth group, and one of the few people in the UK to have worked exclusively with boys and trans women who sold sex on the streets in the 1980s and 1990s.
During her five years as HIV and health consultant for the original charity Streetwise Youth, her role grew to encompass work as a professional educator, counsellor, befriender and streetworker, establishing relationships of trust with this much-maligned sector of society.