Board Member
Councilmember
New Orleans, LA
Councilmember Lesli Harris is a dedicated advocate, attorney, and community leader committed to justice, housing equity, and preserving New Orleans’ culture. As a student at Tulane Law, she began her career representing children in need through Tulane’s Juvenile Law Clinic. She spent 16 years at Stone Pigman, becoming the firm’s second Black woman partner and specializing in entertainment and intellectual property law, representing clients like the New Orleans Saints and Pelicans. She also fought for marriage equality, representing the Forum for Equality and same-sex couples in the case that helped overturn Louisiana’s anti-gay marriage laws.
In 2025, Councilwoman Harris was re-elected without opposition to a second term as the representative for District B, marking the first time in the district’s history that an incumbent ran unchallenged. She also became the first New Orleans City Councilmember overall to secure re-election unopposed since Troy Carter in 1997.
Before joining the City Council, Lesli served as Chief of Staff to Loyola University’s first woman president, where she played a key role in stabilizing the university’s finances and leading its COVID-19 response, drafting policies to protect students, faculty, and staff.
On the Council, she has championed quality-of-life, public safety, justice, and housing initiatives, securing funding to eliminate the backlog of untested sexual-assault kits and working to reopen the city’s DNA lab, earning her the Champion of Change Award from STAR (Sexual Trauma Awareness and Response). She has been a leading advocate for affordable housing, receiving an award from The First 72+ for her work securing stable housing for formerly incarcerated individuals.
Lesli has also emerged as one of Louisiana’s most effective housing advocates. She led the effort to establish the City of New Orleans’ first dedicated Housing Trust Fund, building a broad coalition of advocates and local leaders that achieved a landslide 75% voter approval at the ballot box. The Fund now guarantees a permanent, recurring stream of city funding for affordable housing, investing millions each year into homeownership assistance, rental support, and housing preservation programs that help working families remain in their neighborhoods. Her leadership on this initiative earned her the Mondale Brooke Award from the Louisiana Fair Housing Action Center.