Communications Director

Jess Davidson (she/her) is Communications Director at AAPD. Jess has focused her career on using advocacy and communications strategies to strengthen and preserve the civil rights of multiply marginalized communities. She has multiple chronic illnesses and disabilities. In addition to her work at AAPD, she serves on the Ad Council’s Advisory Committee on Public Issues.

Prior to joining the AAPD team, Jess spent several years consulting for a variety of nonprofits on matters of coalition-building, workplace equity, community-based grantmaking, and public engagement and communications strategies. In 2016, after her own student activism gained national attention, she joined the White House Office of Public Engagement. She then spent several years working to advance the civil rights of survivors of campus sexual violence as the Managing and Executive Director of the national advocacy organization End Rape on Campus. She also served as a member of the Biden Foundation’s Ending Violence Against Women Advisory Council, and the National Steering Committee of the Women’s March.

Jess has briefed Congress and led and supported the drafting of more than twenty-five pieces of state and federal legislation advocating for survivors. Her work has been published in the Georgetown Immigration Law Journal, Washington Post, and Glamour Magazine, among others. In 2016, President Obama and then-Vice President Biden named her a White House Champion of Change.

She graduated with Distinction from the University of Denver, where she was Student Body Vice-President, and holds certificates in Nonprofit Fundraising and Nonprofit Management and Leadership from the Harvard Kennedy School and Georgetown University. Jess splits her time between Colorado and DC, and outside of work is a writer and artist, and enjoys cooking, knitting, reading, exploring the DC arts scene, and participating in downhill paraskiing and wheelchair hiking in the Colorado mountains.