DeNisha Malone was good at this. In college at the University of Memphis, she excelled in a database management course fast enough that the school hired her to tutor other students in it. She worked six internships during those years. None of them paid. She kept a full-time job at FedEx the whole time too, and got through the unpaid stretches on faith more than anything else.
She had mentors in college, professors like Mark Gillenson among them. What she didn't have, consistently, was someone from outside the classroom translating all of that into an actual path: real industry access, real opportunities, real networks. She's said as much herself: she wishes someone from a major company had been a steady presence back then, closing that specific gap between education and career.
DeNisha Malone at Microsoft, before she returned to Memphis.
So she went and found that access herself. She left Memphis for Seattle, where a career in data eventually carried her into Microsoft and MVP status. Microsoft eventually brought her back to Memphis too, and she kept working out of the company's local office for years after that, before leaving this year to build the rest of it on her own. None of that career arc is really the point of this story. The point is what she was already doing with it, long before she was doing it full time.
She's said she's trying to be, for other students now, the steady industry presence she didn't have enough of then. It's hard not to see that same instinct running through everything she's built since.
The smallest version of it shows up in a single referral. She routes students carrying imposter syndrome toward Power BI Women, a group built for exactly that kind of belonging.
A little bigger than a referral is what happens in a classroom. She still teaches directly: three sessions this year alone on using Copilot inside Power BI, built so students and working professionals learn the same material side by side, rather than in separate rooms.
DeNisha Malone with Thinkers and Doers mentees, graduate students in the University of Memphis Management Information Systems program.
Bigger still is Thinkers and Doers, which grew out of mentoring she was already doing, one relationship at a time, before it had a name or a structure. It's become something bigger than mentorship alone. Students get real hands-on experience in data and AI. Small businesses and nonprofits, the kind that often can't afford or build that expertise in-house, get exactly that: real data, AI, analytics, and strategy support they wouldn't otherwise have. The bridge runs both directions, education moving toward industry, and expertise moving back toward organizations that need it. She does a version of the same work through her day job too, as a Fractional VP for Data and AI Strategy, bringing small businesses and nonprofits that same kind of expertise directly. Thinkers and Doers and her consulting work aren't two different things. They're the same bridge, in two different lanes.
None of it stayed her effort alone for long. Thinkers and Doers is now an official affiliate of the Grizzlies Foundation, Memphis's own NBA franchise. Gutting real resources behind the work, not just her own time. That distinction matters more than it looks like on paper. Good intentions don't survive one person's bandwidth forever. They need to become something bigger than any single calendar can hold, and that's the difference between a mentor and an institution.
DeNisha Malone with students at Power in the Pipeline, October 2025, co-hosted with BDPA Memphis at Microsoft's Memphis office.
Other institutions have started trusting the same instinct. Morehouse and the Christopher A. Pugh II Center have both brought her in, not as an isolated favor, but because the work keeps finding new places to prove itself.
She's since carried that same lesson to the people who run mentorship programs of their own. Standing in front of the Mentoring Matters Summit, she told a room full of mentorship leaders something practical: how to use data to make the case for their own funding and growth. It's the same idea passed forward again: the work only lasts if it stops depending on just one person.
DeNisha Malone leads a Power BI workshop for Memphis Data Professionals, January 2026.
What all of that looks like on the ground has a name and a date. She serves as collegiate chair on BDPA Memphis's executive board, closing the gap between local college students and the organization. In October 2025, while she was still working out of the Microsoft's Memphis office, she was co-hosting Power in the Pipeline, a student panel where local students could ask Microsoft employees direct questions about careers in data. One of the students in that room was George Osei, still early in his own path into data and analytics at the time.
Coming home wasn't a side note to her career. It was the plan the whole time: bring back what Seattle and Microsoft taught her, and turn it into something Memphis's students and small organizations could actually use. She's also said she believes students relate to her because she's from their neighborhood, not despite it.
Somewhere in your own network is a student who needs the industry side of that bridge, or a small organization that needs the expertise side, closer than you think.
Hear DeNisha talk about Thinkers and Doers, Power BI, and more in her own words.