Ron Davis is a public school dad, Harvard Law grad, and tech entrepreneur. He serves on the boards of Futurewise, Seattle Subway, The Roosevelt Neighborhood Association, and the University YMCA. He is running to make Seattle equitable, affordable, safe, clean and just.
Ron’s Story: My parents were teenagers when they found out I was coming. My dad took a pay cut from his job at a diner to work in a factory, with the hope it would turn into something more. Eventually my parents got a house and when I was about ten, and my dad started earning a family wage, so he didn’t have to work 60-70 hours a week anymore.
In my teens I lived a more middle class life, with more stability and access to opportunity. I also got lucky a lot. I was the first in my immediate family to get a bachelor’s degree, and by my late twenties I ended up at Harvard Law School, where I graduated with honors. As you can imagine, that transformed my life and it catapulted me into the comfortable professional class.
Rather than practice law, I spun a company out of MIT that was focused on improving mental health for call center workers and tried to make the world better while I raised my two little boys with my kindhearted, brilliant, beautiful wife, who is a family doctor.
Since I launched my startup, I’ve helped bring products and services to market that I believe serve the greater good. This includes everything from helping people age in place to getting underrepresented communities better access to clinical trials, helping progressive political campaigns with access to critical data, and reskilling workers as the job market turns lives upside down.
We moved to Seattle ten years ago. I’d lived most of my life in the Portland area, and after grad school, we wanted to get home to the northwest, but into the big city. In 2013 we rented a one bedroom in U-District right next to Trader Joes, with our one year old, sleeping in the utility closet. When our second was born, we moved the bigger boy into the living room closet. We now own an older rowhouse right where Roosevelt, Ravenna and the U District come together.
Parenting and putting down roots turned my attention to local politics. I had been a progressive since 2001, but I hadn’t yet come to understand how local law is used to build walls around privilege. But I soon saw special interests hard at work shoring up these walls, and saw how much harder this made it for people with working class backgrounds like mine. Of course I also realized the walls were three times as high for people who don’t look like me. I saw how impossible it was for most people from most walks of life to get a toehold in neighborhoods with the kinds of schools, parks, and transit that provide upward mobility, or the kinds of services to help you when you fall flat.
So I rolled up my sleeves and got to work. I got involved in neighborhood improvement through local activism and the Roosevelt Neighborhood Association, and supporting kids, seniors and families through the YMCA; in transit advocacy through work with Sound Transit and Seattle Subway, and statewide environmental activism through Futurewise. I lobbied our businesses to take a more progressive view on taxes and labor and public safety. I showed up and testified, wrote opeds, organized and door knocked, and picketed and marched.
But it wasn’t enough. So I started thinking about what else I could do to help the people in our community. I’m running because I learned it takes too much luck to make it in America. I am one of the few that got lucky and I want to pay it forward so that the next person has a real shot, and to make sure we take good care of people who aren’t so lucky.