Social Engagement
Catskill Carriage believes businesses of all sizes have a critical role to play in building a more sustainable and equitable future. Paraphrasing 7th Generation founder Jeffrey Hollander, businesses must strive to be "good" and not just "less bad." We are proud of our commitment to this philosophy as a guiding principle of our company.
Our founder, Gabriel Brodbar, has been a thought leader and practitioner in the social justice and impact space for over thirty years. He is the Principal of Brodbar Consulting, which focuses on the strategic, management and policy needs of public, private and citizen-sector agencies across a wide array of impact areas including transitional and supportive housing, social impact bonds, foster care and preventive services, drop-out prevention and college success for low-income and minority students, community-based needs assessment tools, anti-sex trafficking efforts and social justice issues writ large.
Prior to starting his companies, Gabriel spent 13 years as the founder and Executive Director of the NYU Reynolds Program in Social Entrepreneurship at New York University, later renamed the NYU Social Entrepreneurship Program. As the first cross-university initiative of its kind, the program worked with students faculty and interested parties from NYU and around the world interested in realizing pattern breaking change of social importance in sustainable and scalable ways. The program created and brought significant social entrepreneurial resources to the field, including the “Social Entrepreneurship in the 21st Century” Speaker Series, several social venture business plan competitions, new undergraduate and graduate classes in social entrepreneurship.
Prior to joining NYU, Gabriel served as the founder and Director of Dartington-i New York, a national and international consulting firm providing a wide range of research and practice tools to city and state child welfare and social service systems, with special expertise in performance contracting systems and supportive housing development. He is the former founding Director of the Office of Housing Policy and Development at the New York City Administration for Children’s Services, where he developed and implemented a data-based method of policy analysis that led to a fundamental change in New York City’s housing policy for children, families and young adults involved in the child welfare system. Prior to that, Gabriel developed and operated award-winning, drop-out prevention and college preparatory programs for at-risk high school students in Houston and New York City including Upward Bound, AmeriCorps, and Liberty Partnership Programs.
Gabriel is a founding member of the Child Welfare League of America’s National Homelessness Advisory Panel, an Advisory Board Member of The New Fashion Initiative, Redwoods Initiative, The Cavendish Impact Foundation, and a Lonely Entrepreneur. He is a Teach For America alumnus (‘91), holds a Masters Degree in Social Work from the CUNY Hunter College School of Social Work and a Masters in Business Administration from the Zicklin School of Business at CUNY Baruch College. His published work on the intersections of foster care and homelessness, community-based needs assessment tools and social entrepreneurship can be found in Child Welfare, The Social Service Review, and Beyond Profit. Gabriel also served as an adjunct professor in Social Entrepreneurship at NYU.
Catskill Carriage was proud to sponsor the first event of the 2018-19 NYU Skirball Talks Series on October 15, 2018, "What Will it Take: Women's Political Leadership." In close partnership with the What Will it Take movement, the guests included Nancy Pelosi, Pat Mitchell, Brittany Packett, Alessandra Biaggi and Kerry Healey. Here's to all of us doing things large and small to continue the trend of more and more women realizing their rightful place in positions of power and leadership.