Davis comes to Press Forward after seven years as Vice President for Strategic Communications and Informed Communities at the Denver-based Gates Family Foundation, where her primary role was to bring greater visibility to the work of the foundation’s grantees and partners, to facilitate knowledge sharing, and to amplify the quality of life issues and ideas of greatest concern to the foundation and Coloradans. In addition, Davis managed Gates’ Informed Communities grantmaking portfolio, and served since 2020 as Director of the Colorado Media Project, a philanthropic initiative based at Rose Community Foundation that to date has raised more than $6 million for local news and made more than 280 grants to small and large newsrooms, capacity builders, and catalytic projects across Colorado — and helped to rally millions more in aligned grants and impact investments directly to Colorado ecosystem partners.

Davis has more than two decades of collective experience in strategic communications, journalism, fundraising, coalition building, strategic planning, and nonprofit management. Before joining Gates, she was Director of Institutional Giving for BakerRipley, Texas’ largest community development agency. Prior to that, she spent seven years as a director of communications, marketing, public policy and fundraising for Houston A+ Challenge, a nonprofit organization working to improve student success in the Greater Houston region’s public schools.

Davis’ decade as a journalist included award-winning education beat coverage for the Daily Breeze newspaper in Los Angeles, breaking news and digital content production for the Austin American-Statesman and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, and public radio news production for the Voice of America in London and both NPR stations (KCRW and KPCC) in Los Angeles. She holds a B.A. in journalism from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, an M.A. in journalism from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication, and a certificate in Comprehensive Fund Development from Rice University’s Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Management. She serves on the Membership Committee for Media Impact Funders, on the public policy committee for Philanthropy Colorado, was on the leadership team for ComNetworkDENVER from 2019 to 2023, and was a founding board member of the Colorado News Collaborative.