Gambit's 2025 40 under 40

Rachel Lewis, 37

Assistant Director of Training, Deep South Center for Environmental Justice

In Rachel’s first year of teaching Spanish for Teach for America, in 2010, a roach dropped right in front of her face in the FEMA trailer she was using as a classroom.

“I had an unofficial job as an exterminator,” Lewis says, noting that she never actually killed a creature. “But we had so many joyful moments in my classroom — joy is really just so woven into the culture of New Orleans.”

Lewis’ career arc in education has bent through schools, prisons and now to recently released people via the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice. Teach For America doesn’t have the greatest retention rate, but Lewis has been in the education system for 14 years.

“I noticed that people who had respect [for] and centered the students' needs were most successful,” Lewis says.

After teaching a mix of Spanish, math and special education for six years, in 2016, Lewis helped start Travis Hill, a school with one campus inside of a juvenile detention center and another inside an adult jail.

“I had students who were incarcerated,” Lewis says, citing it as inspiration to do her work with Travis Hill. “I didn't really know what happened to them; it’s like they just disappeared.”

Now, at the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, she helps plug unemployed and underemployed people into the environmental remediation industry, including people coming home from incarceration.

Lewis is also in the process of starting a nonprofit with the mission to reduce childhood incarceration by supporting young people in the city and their families and helping dismantle systems that are not set up to serve young people.

Alongside all of this, she’s managed not only to raise her two boys but also run social media accounts on how to be an eco-friendly mom, dances with the Cherry Bombs and has a specialty in costuming.