Serial entrepreneur, real estate developer, coach, and mentor, Melissa Wyatt, has spent decades honing her skills through multiple startups and has not stopped innovating despite COVID-19. She is the powerhouse behind MW Enterprises, LLC, a Black-owned privately managed and diversified real estate company that has developed more than $7 million in properties and is focused on building generational wealth for the next generation, uplifting women and people of color in real estate, and making transformation changes in the communities in which she invests.
Melissa also founded the Foundation for Second Chances in 2004, a community-based organization that utilizes hands-on education, mentoring, health awareness, and community service to maximize the potential of youth.
As a real estate developer, Ms. Wyatt has been developing tools to assist her community since the pandemic hit. “We have put safe COVID-19 practices into place that ensure we are staying in contact with our customers. We also have to ensure contractors are safe at construction sites – they are working with various people at once while maintaining social distancing. However, we stay on top of screening and we want to make sure their families are supported as well during this time. The ultimate goal here is to stop the spread of the virus. We’ve also stepped up within our community such as distributing gift cards and food bags, and offering rental assistance to our tenants,” explains Ms. Wyatt.
Her inspiration to continue innovating comes from her grandparents, Black farmers who owned both their land and their home. At a young age, that taught her that Blacks could actually have ownership over real estate. Ms. Wyatt shares, “In my early days of real estate investing, whenever I felt like I was hitting a wall, just knowing how hard my grandparents worked to acquire their own land when in those days people like them faced a lot of barriers kept me going.”
Recently, she launched a farming project paying homage to her grandparents that will also share the history and plight of Black farmers (who own less than 2% of US farmland) and help advocate for community farms to replace food deserts in communities such as the one she grew up in Bakersfield, CA.
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