Lambreni Waddell
Executive Director – Designate
Lambreni Waddell grew up watching lawyers work side by side with the people they served. In the 1970s, when few doors were open to Black attorneys in Texas, her father and his peers turned a house in a low-income neighborhood into a community-based law firm. Lambreni spent much of her childhood there, and that model of legal help rooted in the community has guided her career.
Lambreni earned a B.A. from New York University and is both a OneJustice Executive Fellow and a Racial Justice Institute Fellow at the Shriver Center on Poverty Law. After relocating to Los Angeles nearly 25 years ago, she worked as a community organizer, leading a countywide health access campaign that connected more than 7,000 residents to coverage.
She began her tenure at NLSLA as Director of Community Engagement. She built NLSLA’s presence in the Antelope Valley from the ground up. She secured donated office space, launched legal clinics and brought in grant funding for what became a regional hub. She designed and scaled I-LEARN, which brought legal education workshops to more than 1,000 immigrants at community partner sites. She also helped scale the organization’s reentry clinics by designing tools and training to leverage community volunteers and building a pro bono pipeline with minority bar associations.
Most recently, she advised legal aid and nonprofit leaders on strategy, operations and governance as an independent consultant. She is a mom, an avid mahjong player, dancer, and life-long learner.
