Mesha Davis: AFW’s new CEO on creating a voice for women

Mesha Davis is driven to help people because she doesn’t want them to have to live the way she did as a girl growing up in Milwaukee.

The new CEO of the Arizona Foundation for Women draws inspiration from her mother, who she calls her “power pellet” (Davis is a true Ms. Pac-Man fan).

“We grew up really poor but she had great women that she worked with [in Milwaukee], in her corner, in her ear,” Davis said. “So my mom always told me that we may be poor – and I’m not saying this in a bad way – but we don’t have to act or look poor because sometimes people put a certain image on people who are poor.”

Her mother would insist that hair was combed and posture was correct, Davis said, and would especially “lose it” when Mesha would come back from visiting her grandparents in the South and say “y’all.”

“She just wanted me to have a better life,” Davis said. “She used a friend’s address so that I could go to a better school system.” The school found out but still wanted Davis to stay. School officials even let her mother know that a couple other families living outside the district were doing the same in case they wanted to carpool.

“I was the only black student in the entire school,” Davis said. “I was a city kid in a community of farmers. It was a German-descent community. So I would sing in German and do square-dancing – things that I as a little African-American kid never heard of or did. It was a different experience.”

Davis is settling into her role as CEO, which she assumed last October. The Arizona Foundation for Women, which strives to create a better life for Arizona’s women and children, is a supporting organization of the Arizona Community Foundation. In her previous role as chief development officer at Southwest Center for HIV/AIDS, Davis helped raise millions. Before that, she worked at The Family Partnership in Minneapolis.

The support provided by Arizona Community Foundation includes office space, “which saves us a lot of money otherwise we’d have to put to getting our own facility or leasing out other space,” Davis said. “It’s a wonderful new partnership that we just started last year.” Davis added that her organization also receives office support for financial work and human resources, which allows the foundation to focus on its mission.

Marilyn Seymann, who is still a board member, launched the Arizona Foundation for Women in 1995 after noticing a lack of resources and funding available for women and girls for issues like domestic violence and sex trafficking. The foundation focuses on a few key things, Davis said: making sure women are safe; that they are healthy; and to empower them economically so they could have the resources, the right jobs, and the right pay to help raise a family or be a part of raising a family.

When she lived in Minneapolis she volunteered for the Minnesota Women’s Foundation and helped launch a giving circle group. They would give out grants to small non-profits that sought to help African-American women. Davis helped build the platform, drafted the mission statements and developed the grant applications.

“I got to be around long enough for one grant cycle and it really felt good” to see how the group’s work had an effect, she said.

In her new role here in the Valley, she oversees one of the key elements at the Arizona Foundation for Women. The organization researches issues related to women and uses the results to focus the foundation’s resources – in the form of grants to non-profits – to try to move the needle on the issue.

“Our goal is to drive these numbers to be in a better position for women and that they have a voice, a place, equal opportunities for employment, that they’re getting an education and making sure there are no barriers,” Davis said.