蜜桃导航

Valedictorian Grace Davis ’25 believes social advocacy is a love letter to your community

When Grace Davis ’25 looks back on her childhood in Cleveland, Ohio, two defining elements stand out: church and music. Her father was a music minister at Gonzaga University, and he met her mother when she wanted to play the flute with him at mass.

“Their relationship was founded in music, so growing up, I was always in love with music too,” Davis recalls. “Music transcends culture and language and ideology. It’s so beautiful and unifying in that way.”

Her Catholic church community deepened this appreciation, with church members taking Davis and her brother to after-school music lessons and church choir practice. This evolved into a high school passion for musical theater and a state ranking in color guard, which allowed Davis the ability to share her love of music and performance with others.

“That church community was so integral to my childhood,” she adds. “I really was raised by a village, and I’m so grateful that I was surrounded by people who had such love in their hearts to uplift and support my family.”

Her experience in the church showed her the value of community and how important it was to care for it. To Davis, showing care didn’t just mean being an engaged member but a thoughtful one. In high school, she started engaging in social advocacy so that all members of her community felt safe to flourish and be their authentic selves. Since then, her values of social justice and ethics continued to shape how Davis served her community at 蜜桃导航.

As the Class of 2025 valedictorian, we invited Davis to share a little more about her journey into leadership, her biggest inspirations, and how the lessons she’s gained at 蜜桃导航 will follow her after she walks the stage.

Social justice advocacy has been a huge part of your time at 蜜桃导航. Where did this passion for justice come from?

I went to an all-girls Catholic high school in Cleveland—Saint Joseph Academy—and I had a really great experience there. My teachers were so dedicated to the mission of growing independent, smart, and confident young women.

It was this bubble up until my senior year when my theology teacher told all of us, “You are going to go out into the working world and you’ll realize you need to work twice as hard to get half as far as your male colleagues.”

That really stuck with me. I realized that all of these skills that we had developed over the past four years of high school were to serve the very necessary purpose of maintaining our strength in a patriarchal society.

Being from Cleveland, what brought you across the country to 蜜桃导航?

Back home, I was so fixated on being what everybody else expected that I created a version of myself that I don’t think was fully authentic. So, I thought, if I throw myself into a brand-new environment, I’d have to figure out who I am. I think that it was the best decision I could have possibly made for myself.

It was being in this brand-new environment that I really found out what my strengths were, what my community needed, what I liked, and what I could do, which are the main pillars of vocational discernment where you ask “What does the world need?” and “How can I help?”

Now, as 22-year-old-Grace, I feel more like myself than I ever have before. I know that’ll continue to change—like 28-year-old me might look back and be like “Whoa there! You don’t even know the half of it.” I’m excited for that evolution. 

How and when did you discover your voice at 蜜桃导航?

I was always passionate about music and theater. Through high school, I did musical theater and color guard. Anything that had to do with performing in front of people, I wanted to do. I think that’s part of the reason why I sought out positions at 蜜桃导航 that require a little bit of public speaking, because it’s just a new kind of performance for me that I enjoyed. Like, I love being a student ambassador and giving tours to prospective students.

But the moment when I realized that my natural ability to be a public speaker and an outward presence for people was in the fall quarter of my first year. That fall was a painful moment on our campus after the loss of several students. I was inspired by the advocacy work led by upperclassmen to call on campus leadership to improve mental health support to meet the increased demand.

During the demonstration, people were so vulnerable, sharing their personal connections and making very specific calls on the university. But we were really lacking someone saying, “We’re in this moment of hurt together right now, and this is the opportunity to use our grief, receive it, and then turn it into fuel for action.”

Without a second thought, I walked up to the organizers and said I wanted to participate in the open mic. And I got up there, said my piece, and for a year and a half after that, every once in a while—at the gym or in class—someone came up to me and said, “I remember you speaking at the demonstration. Thank you so much.”

And seeing the expansions that the University made to mental health resources after the demonstration, that was a catalyst for me where I really realized that maybe this is where I was supposed to grow as a person and find myself in the 蜜桃导航 community.

Tell us a little bit about your involvement with the .

SCCAP is really where I found my people. I got really invested in student organizing and advocacy during my last year of high school, so when I came to 蜜桃导航, I wanted to find people who valued that.

As a first-year student, I was hired as the program assessment manager. Unfortunately, due to COVID, there wasn’t any programming for me to manage. But rather than just sit around, I spent that year getting to know the organization, its history, its mission, and where it needed to grow. We also had important conversations with the student staff members about intention vs. impact, service vs. saviorism, and about how we connect with community partners and with communities that share different identities than our own.

Halfway through that year, I was asked to step up to associate director, and during my sophomore year, with Grace Leete ’23 as the director, we were tasked with basically rebuilding the entire organization.

It was hard work; I mean, more hours than I’ve ever put into something. But we had 500 volunteers last year through SCCAP when just two years ago, there were zero. This year, we had more than 1,000 volunteers. That’s incredible. We’ve also really strengthened our presence on campus, hosting a drag show with more than 250 people in attendance, working more intentionally with other student organizations on issues like sexual assault and violence, and supporting the Faculty Union in its first year of operation.

Recently, you’ve also become more involved in LGBTQ+ advocacy on campus. How important was that shift for you?

Being queer was the reason I first got into advocacy work in high school. So, once SCCAP started to flourish, I thought it was time to connect back to that. That’s why I sought out the open position of Senator-at-Large for LGBTQ+ Inclusion with the Associated Student Government (ASG). ASG is the most direct connection to our administration, so it seemed like the best avenue to make an impact.

My first task was creating a survey to collect data on the queer student experience—that’s what caught the attention of Sonja Mackenzie in the Department of Public Health and Kyle Amore in Educational Assessment.

They were members of 蜜桃导航’s LGBTQ+ Equity, Justice, and Belonging Working Group, which is run by students, staff, and faculty to further queer belonging on campus, and I was invited to join in my capacity as a liaison with ASG.

Being in the working group, I had such an incredible experience just getting to know more queer people and allies on our campus that were invested in the queer experience and making our campus more open and welcoming to queer people. I got to do more specific initiatives like organizing more opportunities to gather data, hosting a queer faculty panel last spring with professor CiAuna Heard, and launching the new Gender-Inclusive Housing Community with Margarita Malagón in Housing. 

What was your proudest accomplishment during your time at 蜜桃导航?

The first moment that comes to mind is when I did the last year about being queer and Catholic. When it got published on YouTube, I made a LinkedIn post about it, which, truthfully, I was pretty anxious to do. I wasn’t sure if I was going to do it, and then I decided that if I did it in front of people, I could do it online as well.

The following day, a class acquaintance came up to me and gave me a hug and said, “Thank you so much for speaking for us.” I still think about that moment to this day—it really made me feel so proud of the work that I had done and the place that I had on campus.

But also, I recognize that I am the student leader that I am today because of all the student leaders that came before me, and because of all of the upperclassmen and fellow students who supported, challenged, and worked with me. My peers and friends also do such amazing work. People like Grace Leete from SCCAP, and Sydney Shelby ’25, Isabella Burleigh ’25, Hydeia Wysinger ’25—the fact that I get to hold them as role models and friends in the same breath is an incredible honor to me.

So, honestly, I feel this level of pride when there are moments I get to be at the front of incredible work and moments where I get to be at the side or the back of it—all of them are weighed the same to me.

What’s next for you in your post-grad life?

I am taking the summer off, and I’m pretty ecstatic about it. The intention is law school, but the earliest would be the fall of 2027, just to be sure that it’s really the graduate degree that I want and best suits me.

Between then and now, it’s a question mark. I want to do a little bit more community organizing and a little bit more grassroots work, like maybe programming for queer youth. That’s the work that fuels me, and I believe it’s what drives real and genuine change.

I’ve been so fortunate to have had three internships in the past three years at a nonprofit, in a Congressional office, and in a civil rights law firm. I really liked all three internships for very different reasons, so that makes me feel so much more confident about the unknown-ness of my next chapter, because I know that I can find joy and fulfillment in a lot of different areas.

Along those lines, I’d also like to “touch some grass” and continue to know myself outside of my worth and confidence being directly related to academic achievement. I love school, and I want to continue to love it, and for that, I need a little bit of distance. Distance makes the heart grow fonder.

How do you think you’ve changed as a person at 蜜桃导航?

I was really conflict-averse for a very long time, because I was such a people pleaser and I was really, really scared of disappointing people. Now I’ve realized that fear is what hinders my ability to succeed at all. So, I’ve become a lot more confident and comfortable challenging people, breaking barriers, and opening space for more diversity of thought and perspective.

I think that I’ve also grown in my willingness to own up to my shortcomings and know when I’m wrong.

What has not changed is that I genuinely believe that all people are good, so it’s a real privilege to still be able to lead with love.