about the Founder

Dr. Gina Merritt, MBA, is a nationally recognized real estate developer, social-impact strategist, and community wealth architect whose career bridges the intersection of equitable development, economic empowerment, and systems change. As Founder and President of WFL Collective, she leads a mission-driven effort to remove barriers, expand opportunity, and create sustainable pathways for families to thrive.

Dr. Merritt established WFL Collective to ensure that community revitalization efforts do more than rebuild neighborhoods—they rebuild lives. Through the Collective, she has designed and implemented programs that integrate housing, workforce development, entrepreneurship, and family well-being into a cohesive framework for economic mobility. WFL Collective’s work is rooted in a simple but powerful belief: that people are assets, not obstacles, and every community holds the potential for generational prosperity when given the right tools and support.

For more than two decades, Dr. Merritt has advanced inclusive real estate development through her firm, Northern Real Estate Urban Ventures (NREUV), where she has led over $550 million in affordable and mixed-income housing projects across the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and other markets. Her developments encompass thousands of affordable housing units, alongside community-focused spaces such as workforce training centers, makerspaces, and entrepreneurship incubators.

Under Dr. Merritt’s leadership, WFL Collective and NREUV operate as two sides of a unified mission: combining equitable housing development with human-centered impact. WFL Collective serves as the social-impact and community-services partner to NREUV’s housing projects, delivering resident programs that promote upward mobility through platforms such as Workforce Leverage®, Heighten the Hustle™, and OwnPath™ Homeownership. Together, these initiatives help residents build careers, launch small businesses, and achieve long-term financial stability.

Dr. Merritt’s approach—often described as “development with dignity”—has been recognized nationally as a model for inclusive community transformation. Her work demonstrates that equitable development is not just possible, but essential, when investment capital is aligned with community priorities and lived experience. She has served as a trusted advisor to housing authorities, philanthropic institutions, and mission-based investors seeking to align their resources with measurable social outcomes.

A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Dr. Merritt earned her Bachelor of Arts in Economics, followed by an MBA in Real Estate and Finance, and a Doctorate in Social Innovation (DSW) focusing on equitable economic ecosystems. Her research and professional practice center on building scalable models that close the racial wealth gap by expanding entrepreneurship, workforce inclusion, and asset ownership opportunities for underrepresented communities.

Dr. Merritt is a sought-after speaker and thought leader on topics including equitable development, social innovation, and community wealth building. She has been featured in numerous industry publications for her pioneering work linking housing and human capital in holistic, measurable ways.

Through WFL Collective, Dr. Merritt continues to champion the vision that true community transformation occurs when housing, opportunity, and empowerment are developed hand in hand. Her leadership exemplifies a new standard for social impact—one that builds not only places, but people, creating communities that thrive from the inside out.

Dr. Gina Merritt founded WFL Collective after witnessing how traditional community redevelopment often overlooked the very residents it aimed to help. Having grown up in affordable housing herself, she understood firsthand the barriers that prevent hardworking people from accessing real opportunity — from limited job networks and inconsistent training to the lack of wraparound support that sustains long-term success.

She created WFL Collective to change that. The organization was built on the belief that people are assets, not obstacles — and that development must include both buildings and the people who live in them. Through its collaborative “collective-impact” model, WFL Collective unites housing, workforce, and social-service partners to remove barriers, expand access to employment and entrepreneurship, and ensure that residents directly benefit from investment in their communities.

Check out Dr. Meritt's Website.