Since she was 16, Deanna Singh (MBA ’12) has been harnessing the resources around her to help others in her community. By the time she was a senior at Fordham University in New York, Deanna had founded several different organizations dedicated to helping and creating a network for people in continual poverty.
“There is a true power in being able to rethink our resources and put business practices behind them,” she says. “I’m always asking myself, ‘Is there a way to use the things that are at my fingertips and really elevate them for the people in our communities?’”
Over time, Deanna developed her own toolkit of resources to use to start up new organizations. But what she didn’t have was perspective.
“I needed to step back and look at other practices and weigh my own practices against them,” she says. “Being at the Wisconsin School of Business allowed me the opportunity to do that—to really think about the tools that I had and to be able to assess them, improve them, or get the affirmation that they were the right ones.”
Deanna served as president of the Dohmen Company Foundation in Milwaukee, which supports and invests in self-sustaining organizations dedicated to ensuring people have access to a healthy life. The foundation focuses on health equity and how the definition of “health” must be broadened to consider social, intellectual, economic, and physical health.
Deanna is now chief change agent and founder of Flying Elephant, a holding company for unique social ventures with a mission to shift power to marginalized communities.
“I think my big life goal and purpose is to be able to exponentially impact the lives of others through the opportunities and blessings that I’ve had given to me,” says Deanna. “If I can live a life of meaningful service, then I will feel like I have done my job.”