Barbara Wagner sets an example of the Genuine Do-Gooder as a citizen, as she did as a 7th grader when she convinced the school cafeteria to allow students to purchase pies previously available to only teachers. In the 1960’s, she helped to organize the first rent strike in Syracuse Public Housing. She also took action to correct unhealthy conditions in the research hospital where she worked and to stop a planned hospital expansion that would have displaced people living in low cost housing. Over the past two decades, her watchdog activities have made her village a better place to live.

She is driven by a view that the public interest must be protected especially against corruption and the unfair application of the law. Her deep belief that the government must serve all people equally and that laws must be followed moves her to action.

Most of her efforts start with complaints from residents who have neither the skill nor the stomach to confront authorities. She helps citizens protect their own interests so that authorities make decisions that benefit the entire community. For example, she helped a local beauty shop owner get the state to take action when he told her that an unlicensed hair cutting business was operating in the back of a local dress shop.

Two or three times a year, groups of residents will call about proposals to rezone areas of the village that would change the character of the property that they had invested in. Or, they will ask her help to stop the building of public facilities in inappropriate places; for example, a skate park for teenagers along a dangerous single highway country road. In these kinds of cases, she coaches the residents on what to do and helps them write, print and distribute flyers to get a good showing at the public hearing. She may not even agree with the residents’ position, but she wants to make sure their voices are heard as part of the democratic process and to keep the village board from hasty and ill-advised decisions.