James Lee describes himself as a “social impact entrepreneur.” For him, the phrase captures both the purpose and possibility of his work. “My whole thing is to have a social component and creating more impact,” he said. “There’s a business in everybody.”
As a Housing Equity Strategist with Community Solutions, James brings a sharp vision for how people with lived experience can become leaders, advocates, consultants, and changemakers. Based in Charlotte, he is helping design pathways for people who want to move into advocacy and systems change work. His goal is to make sure that directly impacted people have a clear starting point, training, support, and opportunities to grow.
“My training was on the ground,” he said. “I started as a door-knocking advocate.” From there, James moved into local and county advocacy, meetings with elected officials, conversations with city leaders, and eventually federal advocacy through RESULTS International. “From living on the street, trying to advocate for myself, then advocating for my community, then from my city, then from my county and the state, and now on a bigger scale on the federal level where policy is being made.”
That journey shapes how James thinks about leadership. He knows there are people in every community who want to get involved but do not know how to begin. In Charlotte, he is working on creating that pathway through social justice and community organizing training. The training helps people name their “why,” understand their motivation, and connect their personal experiences to broader community change.
James’ own “why” is grounded in memory, loss, and the hope he once struggled to hold onto. When asked what keeps him grounded, he answered, “the work itself.” He remembers “the hope I didn’t have when I was homeless,” while also recognizing the hope people continue to carry by surviving.
He sees the contradiction every day. “They have hope because they’re still here, but they have no hope because they’re homeless,” he said. “They’re struggling in the system, and the system is letting them down.”
For James, homelessness is inseparable from larger failures in American life. “Our capitalist system, or what we’re doing in America, is letting people down,” he said. “We’re supposed to be uplifting people.”
His own experiences made that clear. When he reached out to the VA for support, he said the response was silence. “After that, it’s crickets.” The support that helped him came from individual people and grassroots efforts, not the large systems that had the resources to respond. One woman sold her home to create transitional housing. Another older woman helped veterans in wheelchairs find somewhere to go.
“That wasn’t a big system that says they want to help,” James said. “It was two individual people.”
This shaped his critique of large systems that claim to address homelessness while failing to meet people’s actual needs. James points to the amount of money spent on temporary fixes, like hotel placements after encampment closures, and asks whether those investments create lasting housing. “You spent $11 million,” he said, “and a year later, those same people are right back in the same place they were.”
James believes the solution requires more than funding. It requires listening to people who understand homelessness from the inside. He sees a difference between lived experience and lived expertise. Lived experience, he explains, is having gone through something and being able to relate to someone else. Lived expertise comes when that experience is paired with data, reports, meetings, policy knowledge, and strategy.
“I have moved from lived experience to now being a lived expert on homelessness,” he said.
That distinction matters because people with lived experience are often dismissed in professional spaces. James says one barrier is the belief that his voice does not count because he does not hold a traditional degree. “Folks believe that my voice don’t count because I’m not a Harvard graduate, I’m not Ivy League graduate, I’m not a college graduate,” he said. But he pushes back on the idea that formal education is the only kind of expertise. “I got a master in life’s experience.”
For James, that knowledge is just as valuable. He understands how it feels to live outside, to search for resources, to be disconnected from systems, and to have to tell your story again and again. He also understands how data and lived experience can work together. “I’ve read the data,” he said. “And I know the data from the person.”
That combination is what makes his leadership powerful.
When James talks about homelessness, he returns again and again to dignity. He wants people to understand that every person has a backstory. “Just because you see somebody who you don’t want to look at, you don’t know what that person has done in his life,” he said.
Someone may be struggling now, but that does not erase who they are, who they have been, or what they may still become. “This might be somebody, a young person struggling now, that might be a person who can cure diseases if given an opportunity,” he said. “We don’t know the potential of people.”
This belief guides his work as a Housing Equity Strategist. He is focused on equity, flexibility, and systems that respond to individual needs. “It’s all about not giving everybody the same thing but giving folks the things that they need,” he said. “If you need 30 days, then I’ll give you that. If you need a year or two, I’ll give you that too.”
James wants people to come away with one clear message: “We matter.”
That message is at the center of his work. People experiencing homelessness matter. People with lived experience matter. People who have been ignored by systems matter. And for James, building better systems starts by recognizing that truth.
