Philippe Lerebours is a person of rare elegance, intellectual range and moral seriousness, whose idealism is grounded with a sense of strategy.
He is a leader who cares about justice, diversity and equity. Philippe clearly feels an obligation to go on thinking and caring and striving in spite of persistent societal challenges.
Coming from a genuinely thoughtful and generous heart, we share Philippe’s story and some of his thoughts with you here. Through it all emerges the real potential for change that our next generation of leaders are hard at work trying to create.
Philippe earned a B.S. degree in Business Administration, with a concentration in Finance, from the Nicolais School of Business at Wagner College in 2019.
He has since been working as a Brand Marketing Coordinator at Fairstead, a real estate investor, developer, owner and operator specializing in affordable and mixed-income housing. Fairstead is home to over 350 employees. Since its inception in 2014, Fairstead has acquired, developed or preserved more than $4 billion in assets comprised of over 15,000 units.
Philippe still serves on the Executive Committee of the Black Professional Alliance at Wagner College to help connect and grow Wagner’s Black community of students, graduates, and professionals. The BPA helps students to gain access to personal and professional development opportunities while receiving exclusive invitations to enrichment experiences, both in person and via virtual platforms. Philippe also continues to work alongside Wagner’s Office of Institutional Advancement, “…to help them strategize and develop methods of engaging Wagner's Black student and alumni population in a meaningful and impactful manner.”
During his years at Wagner, Philippe also served as Treasurer, Secretary, Vice President and in his senior year as Co-President for the Black Student Union and participated in the Bonner Leaders Program, the anchor program within the Center for Leadership and Community Engagement at Wagner.
During my experience at Wagner College, aside from the classroom, I spent most of my time cultivating safe spaces for Black students through my leadership of the Black Student Union. Through this opportunity I quickly learned that safe spaces were a catalyst and tool ultimately towards our success, collegiate and beyond. I dove deeper into this direct relationship through several internships in the real estate space that deepened my knowledge of the complex history and current landscape of real estate development in the New York City metropolitan area.
During his college years, Phillippe interned at Marcus and Millichap, one of the world’s largest commercial real estate firms. He interned as an investment analyst at (and contributed to the blog of) Staten Island’s real estate firm, Casandra Properties. He interned at Juice Bar EV, the acclaimed electric vehicle charging station company helping to build and integrate the infrastructure necessary to prepare facilities and properties for the new energy future of mobility.
Shortly after graduating from Norwalk High School, Philippe became a licensed real estate salesperson for Coldwell Banker in Greenwich.
Born and raised in Norwalk to Haitian parents, Philippe developed a passion for civic engagement, networking, mentoring and philanthropy early in life and became a bright light in the Carver community through the years. Philippe also developed a keen sense of social justice.
While Norwalk is racially diverse, it’s also an example of the racial wealth disparity that exists all across our country. Norwalk’s median household income is a drastic $100,000 less than its surrounding mostly white, wealthy towns. This same disparity holds true between Norwalk’s neighborhoods, creating a quiet, modern segregated city.
This dynamic in the environment that raised me taught me very early in my life that the trajectory of one's life can be tied closely to their proximity to equity, diversity, and access to resources - all of which is often heavily influenced by one’s zip code. This early lesson sparked my interest in communities, spaces and homes, and is what keeps me committed to learning more about people and the spaces that they inhabit.
Philippe became engaged in the Carver community by the 4th grade and never left. He participated in Carver’s after-school and summer programs and most of all the opportunities in between. He worked for our K-5 after-school program called CASPER and our summer camp at the Carver Community Center during his high school years. He fondly remembers Carver staff such as Brian Acevedo and Rhea Gorham as being especially inspiring and helpful.
These two always exuded an inexplicable, consistent, and reliable love and light that was paramount for me during that time, in retrospect. I never left either one of their presence without feeling even better than I did before. They were my pillars in the Carver community. There were others as well, for sure.
Philippe is forgiving and compassionate in his effort to look beyond the futile divisions people make that scream from today’s headlines. Though his eyes miss nothing, and with the attributes of a sharp-eyed geographer, art historian, ethnologist and multilingual poet, Philippe is on a mission.
In my current role at Fairstead, I focus on brand development and strategy. In my position, I use my comprehensive understanding of the vertically integrated approach that our company takes to acquiring, developing, and managing communities across the nation and to strategize methods of leveraging media, press, digital platforms, and print collateral to tell the story of Fairstead to its various stakeholders. Through this role I’m gaining first-hand insight into the broad ecosystem that is the housing market.
In my daily life, through these roles, and in my commitment to exploring the intersection of people and their homes, I am striving to create a dynamic career in the realm of urban planning and housing policy that allows me to lend my interests [in podcasting, reading, fashion, architecture, history, design, policy, and digital content creation] and professional experience to an industry that has a hand in shaping the future of my community by curating homes, spaces, and environments that serve as a catalyst and tool for success.
