The Founder’s Journey: Donna M. Brown
Donna M. Brown’s journey to Talitha Cumi Missions was shaped by more than two decades of leadership with Marriott International and a career devoted to developing people, leading complex operations, and serving through periods of growth, transition, and crisis. Beginning with Marriott in New Orleans in 1988, she advanced across sales, catering, guest relations, audit, housekeeping, hotel operations, human resources, and general management—experience that would later inform her work as an author, scholar-practitioner, nonprofit founder, and faith leader.
At the center of that journey has always been people. Brown learned to look beyond a résumé, recognize potential that conventional measures could overlook, and create opportunities for people to grow. Team members advanced from frontline positions into supervision, management, human resources, operations, and general-management roles, while others became exceptional leaders within the positions they chose. Their growth reinforced a principle that continues to shape her work today: when people are seen, prepared, and trusted, their experience can become a pathway to leadership.
A Career Built Through Leadership and People Development
Brown began her Marriott International career in New Orleans in 1988, building experience across the disciplines that make hotels and people-centered organizations work. At the New Orleans Marriott, her responsibilities included sales, catering, operations, guest relations, and audit. She later moved into housekeeping leadership with Residence Inn before becoming Assistant General Manager of the Residence Inn Metairie.
2001–2003 — General Manager, Courtyard by Marriott, New Orleans. Brown identifies this appointment as a historic milestone in her Marriott career: becoming the first African-American woman to serve as General Manager of a corporate Marriott-managed hotel in Louisiana.
2005–2007 — Marriott New Orleans at the Convention Center. As Director of Operations, Brown's leadership included the extraordinary operating environment surrounding Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.
2007–2009 — Renaissance Hotels, New Orleans. She served in multi-property human-resources leadership across the Renaissance New Orleans Arts and Renaissance Pere Marquette hotels.
2009–2012 — JW Marriott and The Ritz-Carlton, New Orleans. Brown served in senior operations leadership at two of Marriott International's luxury-tier New Orleans properties.
2015–2021 — Bluegreen Vacations Resorts. As a Dual General Manager in New Orleans, she led multi-site resort operations and the opening of a new property.
Across these assignments, Brown's leadership was not defined by titles alone. She developed people, opened pathways for advancement, led through change and crisis, and carried lessons from one level of responsibility into the next.
Education, Professional Development and Selected Works
EDUCATION AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Loyola University — University studies
American InterContinental University — Bachelor of Science in Business Administration
Marriott International — Extensive executive and professional development throughout Brown’s Marriott career, including required annual management coursework, Harvard e-learning programs, General Management Schools for Courtyard by Marriott and Residence Inn by Marriott, and training across human resources, finance, revenue management, leadership, compliance, workforce development, and operational excellence.
Marriott Leadership Excellence Program — Selected for and completed the 2008 leadership program at the Aspen Institute’s Wye River campus in Maryland, including leadership development under Dr. Jay Conger. Brown was later selected for the program a second time but was unable to attend.
SELECTED BOOKS
• The Father Touched Me: Overcoming Abuse — published under the pen name Marie Joseph
• Breaking Cycles: A Healing Reflection Journal — Evangelist Donna Brown
• He’s Not That Smart.. She’s Not That Smart.: The problem was never in intelligence. It was how the world measured it.— Donna Brown
• STILL DONNA: Building a Legacy When Your Brain Says Stop — Donna M. Brown
SCHOLARSHIP AND COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP
Donna M. Brown is the originator of the Brown Theory of Experiential Intelligence™ and a scholar-practitioner whose published work examines lived experience as knowledge, hidden expertise, experiential learning, institutional recognition, systems transformation, and pathways from participation to leadership.
Her scholarship extends into community application through Talitha Cumi Missions and the Community Knowledge Preservation and Activation Program (CKPAP™).
Brown continues her work as an author, ordained minister, nonprofit founder, community advocate, and builder of people-centered systems.
Where Leadership Became Mission
Talitha Cumi Missions is the continuation of a people-first calling shaped across decades of leadership, service, faith, and community engagement. Founded by Donna M. Brown, TCM is a faith-rooted, community-led nonprofit serving women, mothers, children, and families in Greater New Orleans, with a focus on pathways toward stability, dignity, opportunity, and leadership.
TCM’s developing work brings together supportive housing, workforce readiness, community engagement, and knowledge preservation. Its vision is to create continuity across systems that too often operate separately, while qualified partners provide clinical, mental-health, educational, workforce, and other regulated professional services.
Through the Community Knowledge Preservation and Activation Program (CKPAP™), TCM also recognizes lived experience as a source of knowledge. Community storytelling, reflection, skill recognition, and supported leadership pathways are designed to help people identify what they know, strengthen what they carry, and move from participation toward contribution and peer leadership.
Brown’s professional leadership, scholarship, ministry, and lived experience converge here—not as separate chapters, but as foundations for a continuing mission: to see people fully, preserve the knowledge communities carry, and create pathways through which experience can become opportunity, leadership, and legacy.
The Ghana Well Project
Service Beyond Borders
In 2026, faith-rooted service extended beyond Greater New Orleans through a clean-water initiative in Ghana. TCM working in partnership with Sister-Love and Well Constructed, the project supported the Amisuuro Aguuredoo community, where drilling began March 28, 2026.
On May 25, Well Constructed confirmed that construction was complete and community members were drinking clean water from the new well. Designed to provide clean-water access for approximately 379 people, the project turned partnership, generosity, and faith into practical community impact.
From Fragments
to Frameworks
My journey has also required learning how to continue through real disability and periods when I could no longer operate at the pace I once knew. There have been seasons 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, scholarship, frameworks, community work, and pathways intended to help others recognize the knowledge they already carry.
Disability changed how I operate, but it did not erase my calling or end my capacity to contribute. Instead, it strengthened my determination to preserve what decades of experience had produced—and my commitment to people whose abilities, knowledge, or potential may be overlooked because conventional systems do not fully recognize how they learn, function, contribute, or lead.
STILL DONNA: Building a Legacy When Your Brain Says Stop provides the fuller doorway into that part of my story. Here, the lesson is simpler: sometimes leadership is the courage to preserve what remains, build from it carefully, and keep answering the call.
From Professional Practice to Scholarship
Brown’s scholarship did not begin as an abstract academic exercise. It grew from decades of leading people, observing how they learned, recognizing ability that conventional systems sometimes overlooked, and seeing how experience could become judgment, capability, and leadership.
Over time, those observations moved from professional practice into reflection and pattern recognition. Brown began naming and organizing what she had witnessed across workplaces, communities, ministry, and lived experience: people often carry significant knowledge long before institutions have language for recognizing it.
That progression—from experience to reflection, pattern recognition, scholarship, and application—became the foundation for the Brown Theory of Experiential Intelligence™ and a body of scholarly work examining experiential learning, hidden expertise, institutional recognition, community knowledge, and leadership development.
In 2026, Brown established a permanent scholarly record connecting six published research works with her broader professional and community legacy. Her research identity is maintained through ORCID, while her Master Legacy Record is preserved through Zenodo with a permanent DOI.
ORCID: 0009-0006-5089-6791
Permanent Record DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22880161
This record preserves a continuing progression: professional experience became reflection; reflection became scholarship; and scholarship continues to inform service, community application, and the development of others.