Nadine Ngouabe Dlodlo — Founder.

“I was born in Yaoundé. My mother was a bank executive with BIAO (Banque Internationale de l'Afrique Occidentale) and my father was a civil servant but his true passion was real estate. He built houses and rented them to international aid agencies. I grew up spending time with him on construction sites. He died suddenly at age 39 while on a trip. I was 15. By then he had built a sizable estate and upon his death, his (extended) family descended upon us to strip my mother, a grieving young widow, of all our family's assets. It is called land grabbing. She spent the next decades fighting them in corrupt courts.

The imprint of my father never left me. As a banker in Johannesburg in my 20s, I was renovating and building houses as a creative outlet.

A few years later, I earned my MBA at Harvard Business School while single-handedly raising my two-year-old daughter. I had no domestic help except for the occasional benevolence of Class of 2007 student Bianca Tabourn and the parents of my daughter's best friend, the Miles Touya family from Spain (my infinite gratitude). 

My life experience led me to form the Women's Home Preservation Fund and its corresponding real estate development arm the Women's Home Preservation LLC. The mission is to support housing and homeownership for single mothers and widows. We are currently leading a $1.4 million redevelopment of 3 mixed-use buildings in southwest Baltimore, creating housing for female-headed households and healthcare workers

Chassez le naturel et il revient au galop: this work for me is as rejuvenating as breathing fresh air. I am home.”

Nadine was a founding advisory board member of Professor Clayton Christensen's Forum for Growth and Innovation at Harvard Business School and previously served as a trustee of Discovery Charter School, one of the most successful charter schools in New Jersey.

More recently she was awarded the Secretary’s Citation by Secretary Robert S. McCord of the Maryland Department of Planning citing her devotion to the community and her general commitment to Maryland’s future. 

Nadine received her MBA from Harvard Business School.