Woman of Influence: Rachel Canuso Holt

Photography by Jordan Mobley

You’ve seen her in the media, social and otherwise, easily hundreds of times: petite, beautifully turned-out and smiling, graciously attending events, dinners, grand openings, Thunder games and even dinner with Martha Stewart at Cheever’s Café with her husband, Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt. The couple’s two cute kids, George and Margaret, are often in tow, too, completing the city’s charming First Family. She takes that very public segment of her life in stride, happy to do her part ​​— but the truth is she’s a woman of significant depth, a powerhouse in her own right.

Holt is the executive director of Oklahoma’s Office of Juvenile Affairs (OJA), a post she’s held for more than a year after having served in an interim capacity, which began in March 2020. Her career with OJA began August 2016, in the position of deputy general counsel. In November of that year, she was named an assistant attorney general, serving in an assignment as the general counsel for OJA. In December 2017, Holt joined OJA as chief operating officer and senior general counsel.

After being named interim director, she dreamed big dreams for a solid four days — and then the COVID shutdown hit. “By the end of that month, I was sending letters to every judge in the state saying, ‘Please, let's look at our use of detention or use of congregate care,’” she says. Her goal was to try to mitigate the potential effects of the virus sweeping through congregate populations and the staff who manage them. As we enter the endemic phase of the pandemic, Holt hopes to return her attention to the dreams she had when her appointment began, like helping kids get (and stay) out of the system.

“Recently we had a kid who was leaving our facility, who had … committed a robbery with a firearm. And he said to me when he was leaving, ‘My great-grandfather died in prison. My grandfather was in prison. My father is currently in prison. And I will not go to prison because of this program.’ His goal is to break what was a four-generation cycle,” Holt says. And her biggest goal is to give kids the tools to do just that.

A native of Philadelphia, Holt grew up in a row home near the airport, the middle child of three. She says the Canusos were “a typical Italian American family, as you would expect from the portrayals and television of Italians in the Northeast. I spent my summers at the Jersey Shore.” She attended private Catholic and Episcopalian schools, and then went to college at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., graduating cum laude.

“I switched majors a couple of times. I thought I wanted to do political science, but about a month and [I realized] I didn't like anyone that was in political science, or politics, and switched majors ultimately to criminal justice with a minor in women's studies.” It was there that she met a fellow her friends called “Tall Dave from Oklahoma,” whom she began dating right before she left to study abroad in Rome … and her path to OKC began.

Holt took three years off between undergrad and law school, working in the interim as a victim advocate for victims of domestic violence in the Washington, D.C., court system, then as a legal assistant for a small corporate law firm. It was her time as an advocate that Holt said solidified her goals. “You know, as a 22-year-old recent college grad, to work with victims of domestic violence, that was powerful. It made me know I wanted to go to law school and I wanted to try to work with victims, especially women and children.”

She married Tall Dave in Philadelphia in 2003, and the couple moved to Oklahoma City in 2004. A couple of months later, Holt found herself commuting from Oklahoma City to Norman to attend law school. She graduated from the University of Oklahoma College of Law in 2007 with recognition for her participation in the interdisciplinary training program in child abuse and neglect. During law school, she was a licensed legal intern in the school’s civil clinic and with the Oklahoma County district attorney’s office.

Regarding her current role, she explained that the goal of juvenile justice is to intervene early and keep kids out of the system as much as possible. Her ultimate goal would be to break the societal and generational cycles and factors that land young people in trouble in the first place, thus rendering her own office and its services obsolete.

“The goal of juvenile justice, and what best practice tells us and research tells us, is that you need to be cognizant of the crime and address the crime and public safety and accountability, of course — but you also need to look at the individual child and their needs and constraints and risks, and form a plan for them to do better. The goal should not be to punish, but to rehabilitate and give them productive futures, not futures that are prison or death,” she explains. “And so we work on that every day at our agency.”