Learn · Rise · Create
Michael Olaiya.
Founder · Board Chair
My mission is a simple one: to help people learn, to command their money instead of fearing it, and to reach further than they were told they could — while keeping music and art at the heart of a life well lived.
Profile
Builder and creative both, I’ve never been able to choose between the two, and a long time ago I stopped trying. I’m as at home building a company as filling a canvas — and what ties it all together is one stubborn belief: that talent is everywhere, but opportunity is not, and that the tools of enterprise are among the most powerful instruments we have for closing that gap. It isn’t a belief I arrived at in a boardroom. I learned it as a child, at a place that opened doors my circumstances hadn’t — a story I’ve set down here.
By training I’m a pharmacist — Xavier University of Louisiana — and by trade, I build. But if you really want to know me, it isn’t on any résumé: I’m a godfather to six children, across five of my closest friendships — the honor I treasure most, and the thing that keeps everything else in perspective.
Convictions
Education
Learning is the closest thing I know to a fair start. I want more people — the young most of all — to reach it early and keep it for life.
Financial literacy
Money is not the point, but understanding it is protection. I care about teaching people how to hold it, grow it, and pass it on with intention.
Opportunity
Talent is everywhere; opportunity is not. What holds people back is rarely ability — it is access, information, and a door no one ever opened for them. I open a few, quietly, for people who were never handed the key.
Mentorship
No one arrives on their own. A word at the right moment, a door held open, someone who simply shows up — these shape a life more than almost anything else. I try to be that person, especially for the young.
Community
Strong communities aren’t built by heroes; they’re built by neighbors who invest in one another. I put my time where I live, and I trust that small, local acts compound into the biggest changes.
Faith
Faith is the quiet foundation under all of it — it keeps me grounded when things are good, steady when they aren’t, and accountable to something larger than myself.
Purpose
I believe, more than almost anything, in giving back. My philanthropy has one center of gravity: underserved communities — the kind that raised me. Everything I give my time and resources to grows from that single root — a child’s education, a family’s financial footing, opportunity where there was little, and the health and promise of young people handed fewer chances than they deserved.
Cancer research holds a particular place among these commitments; I know what a single breakthrough can mean, to a person and to everyone who loves them, and it will always have my support. But it all traces back to one conviction — that a community once decided my future was worth investing in, and I intend to spend my life being that for someone else.
Pursuits
Away from the work, I’m a musician who has been fortunate to share stages with artists I grew up admiring, a collector and maker of art, a writer, and a traveler most alive in a country whose signs he cannot yet read. These aren’t hobbies I keep at the edges — they’re how I stay whole.
Affiliations
A few of the rooms I’m grateful to stand in: I’m a member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity and Emerging 100 of Atlanta, a Fellow of Sutton Capital and the 2024 cohort of MCEL, founding board chair of PEACE Academy, and treasurer of Peace Through Action.
Writing
Talent Is Everywhere. Opportunity Is Not.
What a folding table, a chess set, and a room full of volunteers taught me about the one thing that actually decides a life.
Read the essay →Rise
Someone bet on me before I had anything to show for it, and I have never forgotten how that felt. So let me say to you what I wish someone had said to me sooner: you are not behind, and you are not too late. The distance between where you are and where you’re going is almost never talent — it’s a door, and doors can be opened. Find yours. Walk through it. Then turn around and hold it open for the next person. That is the whole of it — and it is how any of us rises.
Contact
I still believe the best things begin with a real conversation. If something here moved you — an idea, a cause, a piece of your own story you caught in mine — I would genuinely love to hear from you. My door, like the ones I’m forever trying to open, is open.