Doreen has a versatile career background that combines academic scholarship, corporate leadership, and entrepreneurship in various disciplines. As a person focused on continued multi-sector growth and learning, Doreen dedicated two decades to higher education teaching, research, and administrative progress at California community colleges, California State Universities (CSU), and over 12 years within the University of California (UC) system. Mainly teaching and completing research projects at Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSI) such as community colleges and UC campuses, Dr. Danielson applied her research findings on developing innovative fundraising and philanthropic initiatives, academic programs and accredited courses, and corporate funds and opportunities for minority and low-income student populations.
Obtaining a Doctor of Leadership (Ed.D.) in Organizational Leadership and Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Rhetoric empowered and inspired Doreen to utilize her diverse skills in providing crisis management and organizational transformation services to struggling and failing corporations, allowing her to rebrand and rebuild corporate entities from scratch. Building organizational identity, branding, creating organizational structural frameworks, and structuring effective business models became one of Doreen’s favorite creative missions, inspiring her to build her own business models for two successful brands that she trademarked in a rural area in California to contribute to local economic growth. While still teaching full-time as a UC professor and working as a corporate executive, Doreen grew both of her companies and sold them to minority families, empowering them and guiding them towards business ownership and business management in order to better their lives for generations to come.
As a first generation immigrant from the Middle East, Doreen comes from a trying childhood encompassed by religious, racial, civil, and educational inequality and years of war. Because of her years of experiencing discrimination and injustice on a personal level, along with her extensively diverse career-focused endeavors, Doreen has always believed that every local, rural, underserved community deserves ongoing advancement efforts regardless of the range of struggles. For this reason, she has devoted most of her life to serving local philanthropic initiatives at local nonprofits and organizations in rural communities in many different capacities.
