Tiny House Webinar Series

In 2012, Lee built her own house on wheels and started the nation's first tiny house community in Washington DC to model how tiny houses could be used as urban infill. Her tiny house work has been featured in numerous media outlets, including NPR, Washington Post, Atlantic Cities, Dwell, Inhabitat, Al Jazeera, Architectural Record, and CNN.

At the heart of her personal philosophy, Lee believes that a sense of home and belonging are essential to developing healthy communities and individuals.

With a background in community development, education, and geography, Lee helps citizens and communities to envision and enact housing and land stewardship models that are driven and owned by them.

She has mapped land tenure and natural resources throughout Latin America with citizen groups, managed geospatial projects for the US government, and educated cities and citizens on tiny house development and zoning. She is currently building a data platform for zoning related to tiny houses.

After downsizing her homes and lifestyle over the course of 10 years, Jewel designed and built a beautiful 360 square foot tiny house in May of 2015 that she calls home. Located in Charlotte, North Carolina, her urban and very chic tiny home has twice been a big hit on HGTV, has been featured in numerous print mediums both nationally and internationally and her most recent “I Live in a Tiny House” docuseries feature on Apartment Therapy’s TheNewHomesmiths won an award for its very real discussion and exploration into racism, housing inequality and redefining community.

A project manager and consultant by day, Jewel’s also a tiny house advocate and community leader sharing her experiences, offering consulting services and teaching workshops throughout the country to encourage and assist others in achieving their tiny living dreams. Her home represents a desire that many have to reduce their ecological footprint and focus more on practices of less and sustainability. Jewel is also the founder of Tiny House Trailblazers; a duo collaboration of powerful and uniquely talented black women who together are strong voices and a force for representation within the tiny house movement.

Tiny House Trailblazers is the collaboration of Jewel Pearson, Ms. Bohemian Soul and Dominique Moody, artist and builder of the NOMAD. Tiny House Trailblazers was established to ensure our voices were heard and our faces seen within the tiny house community.

Instead of continuing to wait for invitations to other tables we’re focused on building our own, gathering the people who aren’t always represented in the larger tiny house movement and continuing our work with people who respect and value inclusion. The tiny house movement presents an opportunity to redefine housing and to build real community, however real community can’t be built if everyone’s not represented.

We’re trailblazers, advocates and educators, sharing our experiences and expertise. We’re working to change and challenge the status quo of housing and community, on efforts to have tiny houses recognized as viable solutions and options for affordable housing and to address housing inequity and we’re holding our space and ensuring representation in the process. We’re trailblazers in the tiny house movement and now we’re five plus years in. We’re advocates and educators within the tiny house movement, sharing our experiences and expertise. We’re working to build real community within the tiny house movement and we’re holding our space and ensuring representation.