Chris Lambert founded Detroit-based Life Remodeled back in 2010 to revitalize neighborhoods by refurbishing vacant properties and using dormant schools as one-stop hubs where families can thrive.
The idea is to repurpose properties into places of opportunity for entire families to thrive, filling them with nonprofit organizations who are providing youth programs, workforce development, and human services to tens of thousands of students and community members each year.
For 15 years, Lambert as the CEO and founder of Life Remodeled, has led that effort with a great deal of success. Now Lambert is moving on to tackle new responsibilities as the president and CEO of Next Level Nonprofit, a nonprofit Life Remodeled spun off last fall to help other nonprofits reach the level of success Life Remodeled has attained.
“When I launched Life Remodeled, I set out to partner with communities and organizations to create neighborhood revitalization that lasts,” said Lambert. “We are entering into an exciting new era of leadership that reflects the communities we serve and continues to strengthen the foundation we’ve built. I look forward to continuing to serve on the organization’s board, becoming the biggest Life Remodeled champion ever seen, and taking on a new endeavor that will help significantly increase impact in the nonprofit sector globally.”
Lambert, who earned a bachelor’s degree in marketing from Indiana University and his master’s of divinity from the Fuller Theological Seminary, was recently recognized as a Best and Brightest CEO by the Best and Brightest Programs sponsored by the National Association for Business Resources.
As part of that process, Lambert discussed a variety of business issues for Corp! Magazine:
Corp! Magazine: Talk about Life Remodeled.
Chris Lambert: There’s a lot of talk but not enough walk when it comes to revitalizing Detroit neighborhoods. Life Remodeled works with communities and organizations to create neighborhood revitalization that lasts.
Our unique model repurposes vacant school buildings into one-stop hubs of opportunity where families can thrive. We fill these hubs with the best and brightest nonprofit organizations and facilitate collaboration to create far greater life transformation together than was previously possible alone.
Corp!: What’s the biggest challenge for your business:
Lambert: Talent is evenly distributed all over the world, but opportunity is not. Our challenge in Detroit is that many residents don’t have equitable access to opportunities to thrive. For example, 88% of third grade students in Detroit read below grade level. Detroit residents’ median household income is 50% less than suburban residents. 30% of Detroiters cannot access the healthcare they need, and Black Detroiters have a life expectancy of five years less than their suburban peers.
Corp!: How do you deal with those challenges?
Lambert: Our response to the challenges Detroit students and residents face is to partner with them to discover their hopes, dreams, and visions for the future. After learning from the community, we do whatever it takes to find a way to raise the needed resources and inspire the right organizations to move into their neighborhood and create meaningful access to thriving opportunities.
Corp!: The U.S. has been impacted by inflation and other economic issues the last couple of years. How have those kinds of issues affected your business?
Lambert: For many years there has been a saying that when America catches a cold, Detroit catches pneumonia in both lungs. That said, inflation usually hits low-income neighborhoods the hardest, which only further accentuates the importance of working collaboratively throughout our region to ensure Detroit residents have access to meaningful opportunities to thrive.
Corp!: What is your company’s culture, and how important is that to your success?
Lambert: Since our culture is the backbone of our success, we are very selective about who we choose to join our team to help lead our mission into the future. We only hire team members who have consistently been living out the three core values that most clearly define who we are. Every decision we make about hiring, firing, compensation and promotion is guided by these three values: Community first, always find a way and bold humility.
Year after year, our projects grew larger and increasingly impossible. We needed more and more people who would never give up, no matter the challenges they would face… regardless of the odds. Today, we’ve arrived at a strategy that we are replicating. We’re the most organizationally stable we’ve ever been… but certainly no less crazy. Our annual goals are always nearly out of reach. Unforeseen circumstances happen. Things change, and we are not only flexible, but we find better solutions than ever before. Every day we are innovating and creating a future that doesn’t yet exist. There is always a way, and our team is made of those who not only believe this, but they make it happen.
Corp!: What is the most important lesson you have learned in business?
Lambert: In 2016, when Detroit Public Schools asked Life Remodeled to repurpose the soon-to-be vacant Durfee Elementary-Middle School, we immediately informed community leaders about the request, and most were actually very supportive. However, they didn’t know the property was about to be leased to us for $1 a year for 50 years, because we weren’t supposed to make the negotiation details public.
Due to my blind spots at the time, I thought people in the community would be excited about us spending only a dollar because we could then focus more resources on the building and programming for the community. The key word here is “for,” but I’ll come back to that. Once we inked the deal and made it public, community members were furious. We experienced extremely high levels of pushback at crowded public meetings and even death threats. The disunity in the community was so strong that our internal team was experiencing disillusionment. For the first time in my life, I was thinking about quitting a project. We were facing a massive problem where the solutions were entirely unknown.
Luckily, we had recently hired a new team member named Dwan Dandridge, who was not only well respected by community but also an incredibly effective bridge builder. We leaned into Dwan’s wisdom and discovered the paramount issue was community leaders didn’t feel respected, valued, or even included in this project. The keys were my willingness to value the expertise of Dwan over my own and to humble myself among community members, even to the point of apologizing for the missteps our organization and I had made. That led to tremendous levels of trust being built internally with our existing team and externally with community members. It also led to increased confidence and support from the philanthropic community as they witnessed how we navigated this tumultuous situation.
Corp!: What is your greatest passion in life?
Lambert: The driving passion of my life is to follow in the footsteps of a certain Jewish construction worker who lived about 2,000 years ago. I believe he was brutally murdered, then came back to life, and that he is doing a phenomenal job remodeling my life each day. And believe me, he’s got his work cut out for him.
