A Lifetime of Leadership and a Continuing Call to Serve
The Founder’s Journey: A Message from Donna Brown
Welcome to Talitha Cumi Missions. The spirit of service, stewardship, and community refuge that defines our organization is rooted in a lifelong journey here in New Orleans. Across nearly three decades with Marriott International, I was entrusted to develop teams, lead complex operations, and stand with our community through moments of growth and crisis. I believe each step was purposeful preparation for the work of Talitha Cumi Missions.
My greatest professional accomplishment has always been developing people. I learned to look beyond a résumé, recognize the “diamonds in the rough,” and cultivate excellence across genders and generations. Whether team members advanced into supervision, management, and general-manager roles or became unmatched leaders in the positions they chose, their growth demonstrated what becomes possible when people are seen, prepared, and trusted.
Where Leadership Became Mission
Talitha Cumi Missions is the continuation of a people-first calling: to help women, mothers, children, and families move from instability toward safety, dignity, opportunity, and leadership. The organization is faith-rooted and community-led, with a focus on housing stability, health equity, education, navigation, and peer leadership in Greater New Orleans.
TCM is developing a campus-based hub where participants can access coordinated pathways while qualified partners provide clinical, mental-health, workforce, educational, and other regulated services. TCM’s role is to create continuity—helping families connect the pieces that fragmented systems too often leave separated.
Through the Community Knowledge Preservation and Activation Program (CKPAP™), lived experience is treated as knowledge rather than deficiency. Community storytelling, reflection, skill recognition, and supported leadership pathways help participants move from receiving support toward becoming peer contributors and leaders.
Philanthropic investment will help TCM build the infrastructure, partnerships, evidence, and community-centered capacity required to bring this vision responsibly into practice.
Education, Professional Development and Selected Works
EDUCATION AND DEVELOPMENT
Loyola University — academic studies, 1987
Bachelor of Science in Business Administration — American InterContinental University, 1998
Marriott International — annual required executive and professional-development coursework, including Harvard e-learning programs, together with training in human resources, finance, revenue management, leadership, compliance, workforce development, and operational excellence.
SELECTED BOOKS
The Father Touched Me: Overcoming Abuse — 2024, published under the name Marie Joseph
He’s Not That Smart. She’s Not That Smart. — What They Didn’t Know — 2026
Healing Journal, companion to The Father Touched Me — 2026
Still Donna … — 2026
SCHOLARLY AND COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP
Donna M. Brown is the developer of the Brown Theory of Experiential
Intelligence™ and related community-knowledge frameworks. Her scholarly work examines lived experience as knowledge, health equity, systems transformation, recognition of hidden expertise, and pathways from participation to peer leadership. She serves as Founder and CEO of Talitha Cumi Missions and continues her work as an author, speaker, faith leader, community advocate, and builder of people-centered systems.
From Fragments to Frameworks
My journey has also required learning how to continue through disability, chronic physical limitations, pain, fatigue, and periods of disrupted concentration. There have been seasons when I could not operate at the pace I once knew, when ideas arrived in fragments, and when I had to pause, document, reorganize, and begin again.
Yet those fragments were not evidence that the vision had ended. They became pieces of something larger. With faith, discipline, support, and the tools available to me, I continued transforming lived experience into books, frameworks, community programs, and pathways intended to help others recognize the knowledge they already carry.
Disability changed how I operate, but it did not erase my calling, diminish the value of my experience, or end my capacity to contribute. It taught me that leadership is not measured only by speed, physical endurance, or uninterrupted productivity. Sometimes leadership is the courage to preserve what remains, build from it carefully, and keep answering the call.
A Path of Service and Groundbreaking Leadership
Donna M. Brown’s hospitality career began with Marriott International in 1988. Her New Orleans leadership record includes sales, catering, guest relations, audit, housekeeping, hotel operations, human resources, and general management.
2001–2003 — General Manager, Courtyard by Marriott, New Orleans; founder-confirmed as the first African-American woman to serve as General Manager of a corporate Marriott-managed hotel in Louisiana.
2005–2007 — Director of Operations, Marriott New Orleans at the Convention Center. During Hurricane Katrina, she remained with a five-person executive team that helped shelter first responders, pharmacists, associates, and others relying on the hotel as a place of safety.
2007–2009 — Multi-Unit Director of Human Resources, Renaissance New Orleans Arts and Renaissance Pere Marquette.
2009–2012 — Director of Operations, JW Marriott New Orleans, and Director of Hotel Operations, The Ritz-Carlton, New Orleans.
2015–2021 — Dual General Manager, Bluegreen Vacations Resorts, leading a property opening and multi-site operations on Decatur and Common Streets.
Across these roles, leadership meant opening doors, building capable teams, protecting people during crisis, and turning operational responsibility into service.