Lorenzo Lewis

Senior Fellow in Social Innovation

Freedom is your birthright.

Social entrepreneur and speaker Lorenzo Lewis models his life around liberation. As the founder and former Chief Visionary Office of The Confess Project, a leading national grassroots movement that empowers barbers to become mental health advocates for men of color, Lorenzo understands that releasing trauma is the only way to move forward.

In the barbershop, Lorenzo witnessed the intersections of poverty and violence and learned that people need more support—they need pathways to careers, wealth, and liberation. He helped create a revolution in mental health and in turn, it led him to look deeper inside himself.

Born in jail to an incarcerated mother, Lorenzo struggled with depression and anxiety throughout his youth. At 17, he almost re-entered the system of mass incarceration he had come from. It was then he snapped in and began his journey to wellness.

It started with an education at Arkansas Baptist College and continued with him facing his own emotional challenges, eventually becoming a mental health advocate and changemaker. Since then, Lorenzo has given talks at numerous entities across the country—Snapchat, Google, ADCOLOR, Stanford University, and Texas Rangers, to name a few. He is also a two-time TEDx speaker.

Building upon the work he has done over the past 15 years, Lorenzo is now dedicated to the empowerment, wealth-building, and wellness of others. His passion to help underserved folks like himself break into the free market led him to partner with Crown Cutz Academy founder Craig Charles to create Uplift Barber and Beauty Academy, the first barber school in the country that incorporates mental health and entrepreneurship into the curriculum. 

Lorenzo believes building generational wealth is key and has launched several family businesses that not only generate opportunities for his wife and daughter but help everyday folks succeed. Additionally, his parent nonprofit L&J Empowerment is focused on juvenile justice and workforce development.

Community comes first in all of Lorenzo’s endeavors—whether it's the people he serves or the talent he hires. He believes that when you empower individuals, you empower the community. His book, Jumping Over Life’s Hurdles and Staying in the Race, threads together these lessons to tell a story of how he became the visionary he is today.

Now, his story continues. Committed to fighting for his freedom and others, his unconventional experiences give him a unique perspective to explore the ultimate questions he seeks to answer in his work—how we connect, how we heal, and how we thrive.