Note: This interview in the Weekly Wisdom Series originally aired on July 15, 2024 as part of the University Innovation Alliance’s Innovating Together Podcast, appearing live on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The transcript of this podcast episode is intended to serve as a guide to the entire conversation, and we encourage you to listen to this podcast episode. You can also access our summary, along with helpful links and audio from this episode.
Aimée Eubanks Davis:
And I, to your point, don't feel like you hear other people in the for-profit world that start things and/or come in and lead things for a long time being asked when are they going to leave? I wonder when the last time Mark Zuckerberg got asked that question, right? And so, I don't know, it's just one – it brings me incredible joy and gratification, but then also, I have been able to see not only through the Fellows work, but also the incredible team at Braven. Just truly, the next generation of leaders emerge from everywhere. And I'm like, why would I stop doing that? I just don't know how I would spend my time otherwise.
Bridget Burns:
Welcome to Innovating Together, a podcast produced by the University Innovation Alliance. This is a podcast for busy people in higher education who are looking for the best ideas, inspiration, and leaders that will help you improve student success. I'm your host, Bridget Burns. Each week I partner with a journalist to have a conversation with a sitting college president, chancellor, system leader, or someone in the broader ecosystem who's really an inspiring leader. And the goal is to have a conversation to distill their perspective and their insights gathered from their leadership journey. Our hope is that this is inspiring and gives you something to look forward to each week. Each week I team up with usually a reporter in the field. Today you're going to get a chance to hear all of my questions, and we usually identify a leader in the field that we think is positioned in a unique role that has a vantage point on the work of the day, but also we're looking at a leader and looking at their profile and we're trying to understand how they became a leader. We want to try and understand their perspective and how they're using that influence to drive change. So that's why we call it Start the Week With Wisdom, always very positive on a Monday. So today is definitely one of those days.
I also want to share with you that Weekly Wisdom is sponsored by Mainstay, which is the student engagement platform that actually engages in peer-reviewed research, which is something that we would encourage all EdTech companies to engage in. And they've been able to prove that what they do actually works by reducing summer melt at Georgia State by 21%, and they help them retain an additional 1200 students. So, check out the research at mainstay.com. The show is also supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which we appreciate their generous sponsorship.
Now, on to our fantastic guest. So, I'm so excited to introduce to you Aimée Eubanks Davis, who is the CEO and founder of Braven, and I have long known her in the field, and I'm just so excited to finally be able to elevate you and invite you on the show.
Aimée Eubanks Davis:
Well, thanks so much for having me, Bridget. I'm excited to be here.
Bridget Burns:
So, I'm guessing, you're coming in from Chicago?
Aimée Eubanks Davis:
I am coming in from Chicago, my hometown. Though often I also say that I live on United Airlines because so much work.
Bridget Burns:
I know it's hub there, so you probably have status and it's okay, but otherwise I'm like...
Aimée Eubanks Davis:
It's not enough status in the world for all that comes from being a frequent flyer on any airline, of course.
Bridget Burns:
So first I want to just start by giving a little bit of background about Braven. And as a founder, I find those stories so interesting because you had this distinguished career, you've done a lot of things, one of them being a leader at Teach For America and a variety of other things. You were an Obama Fellow, you could have done anything, but you start Braven, and I want you to tell us that story, but also help us understand what exactly Braven is so that folks who don't know can understand.
Aimée Eubanks Davis:
Sure. So, I am an accidental entrepreneur. There are certain people who are entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial and serial entrepreneurs. I am actually a person who came to the idea of Braven actually based on working on one thing for a long period of time, which was at the time I had spent eight of my 13 years on the senior team at Teach For America overseeing all of our people work. And so, I was obsessed. I think of myself as a talent nerd about how did you get more young people who shared the racial and income backgrounds of Teach For America students, which I had a ton of myself. How do you actually get them into the organization as teachers, then also as leaders over time, on the staff and out into other places. And what we started to see after having 50,000 young people apply pretty much every year for a strong set of four to five years to Teach For America, a lot of people knew that. What people didn't know is we had another 30,000 people applying to our staff every year.
So, I was obsessed with the core pipeline because I wanted to make sure that the staff pipeline was going to be strong in terms of making sure that it represented the students who we were having the privilege of teaching. But what you started to see was that students of Teach For America teachers, some of my own, who started to say, "I want to be just like Mrs. Eubanks," which is such a moment when you hear any of your former students say they want to go into teaching because of you. Actually struggling to Teach For America selection process, and there was a lot that that organization needed to do and then did do to make sure that there was real equality of opportunity in the selection process. But what I knew was that Teach For America was looking for early-stage talent, just like investment banks, just like consulting firms, just like other government or nonprofit organizations.
And if our former students were having a hard time coming over our selection bar, they were likely going to have a hard time coming out strong into the world of work. And so, that was the first part of it. The second part of it was I kept up with a number of my former students, and a lot of other Teach For America alums were doing the same thing. And we were hearing from them that even with fantastic bachelor's degrees, they were struggling to come out into the labor market strong or even figure out that next step into graduate school that would help them economically over time. And so finally, Braven really emerged accidentally when I was an Aspen Institute fellow in the Pahara program, really thinking about how I might pay it forward. And I just said, "I'm going to write a paper about the lost talent of the country and how we have all of this amazing, incredible talent that's actually being sidelined."
And we don't even realize it simply because they're first in their families to go to college, often on the Pell Grant, and that they are often identifying as coming from underrepresented minority backgrounds in the professional workforce, and they don't have the skills, the networks that they need to actually get connected strong into the labor market. And so, what started out as a research paper basically to fulfill a fellowship then became this thing I couldn't get away from. And mainly because I really did feel like, which turned out to be true, that Braven could address a solvable problem that if a young person had come through all of K-12 and often, in many cases, some pretty rocky moments to get to the doors of higher ed and be on their way out, that this should not be the hardest thing. For them to get a high-quality job or go into graduate school should not be the hardest thing. And so that's really how Braven emerged.
Bridget Burns:
I want to talk more about your leadership journey, but I also am aware that the folks who are in the audience work at institutions, and I think they're probably immediately thinking because this issue of college-to-career, this idea of how challenging it is to navigate that space and that there are a few exemplars that dominate any attention in terms of institutions, but otherwise this is a space is a huge weakness for us as a field. How do they partner with – is it individual institutions, or how could a campus partner with you?
Aimée Eubanks Davis:
So again, I came at this through K-12, and as a former teacher and a talent nerd, I had sent lots of young people off to the doors of college because, like myself, I really felt like that was one of the greatest equalizers, having hardworking parents who gave everything for my sister, my older sister and I in particular, but then also my younger brother and younger sister to be able to live the, quote unquote, “American Dream,” however you see that playing out. College was absolutely a part of that equation for our parents, who started to build a business when I was four. And by the time I was 14, we had really experienced what it meant to be economically mobile, and yet our very hardworking parents were not in the professional workforce and could not guide us through coming out on the back end of college and what we might do next.
And so, when I was writing this paper, the thing I really honed in on was how important I thought systems were – and actually big systems were – to the solution. In the sense that the students who I taught in New Orleans pretty much were going to either historically Black colleges and universities like Dillard or Xavier, or they were going to big state schools like a Louisiana State University. Sure, a few of them were going to Tulane or maybe were going out of state, but by and large, they were going to schools that are going to be the biggest producers of young people who are going to go after the American promise and honestly should reach it. And yet, many of those schools have very limited resources. And so, basically, one of the ideas I had pretty early on, and I thought nothing of it at the time, was that we should actually be in real partnership and full partnership with colleges and universities.
Some other entrepreneurs, who I would say are much more entrepreneurial than I am, said to me pretty early on, "Why would you do that? Why would you go work with colleges and universities? They're huge bureaucracies." And I just simply said, "Well, that's where the students are." And so, we got super lucky in that we were at first running this as a 17-person bootcamp at San Jose State. And actually, there were some deans and faculty members who caught wind of what we were doing because the students started to say, "This work that I'm doing with an organization" (that was not even called Braven at the time) "is so important to not only me seeing how I get through SJSU, but also how I get out of here and I'm able to, if I have debt, pay off that debt or, honestly, help my family."
And so, it was actually a senior level faculty member in engineering and some associate deans in business and science who basically said, "We want to have a conversation with you about: one, what are you doing? Why have you never talked to us as a university? And two, we think you're onto something." And so, the Braven model of being a course inside of higher education actually happened through those incredible women who are actually sitting inside. So, I always think of Braven as an entrepreneurial effort. I'm always like this was a thing that started with lots of collaboration from inside of higher education and someone who happened to be outside of higher education, but who was sending a lot of young people there.
And so, it was just really incredible to watch this collaboration come into play in the beginning because it was in Dr. Elaine Collins’ course called Success for Transfer Students, actually, that she said, "Hey, let's partner together and run this course." And the first thing I said is, "Can we please change the name? I really feel like if we're going to really get a lot of students excited about it, that the name in and of itself might need to look and sound a little bit different.” And so, we decided to title the course Life Is a Startup, trying to really play off of the Bay Area, but also really just giving it something for the students to hold onto, is that they were starting up their lives, that this wasn't the end point for them. And basically, because of that very unique collaboration with those incredible women – which, I often say, I'm not surprised they were women. I often think women sometimes – no offense to the male gender – are actually more collaborative. But that's how the Braven model started to be.
And then after that, I met the incredible Nancy Kanter, she was early in her career at Rutgers Newark, who was like, "I love this model. It makes so much sense." And then that was the first time where I heard someone say, "But the credits, how did you get the credits?" And I was like, "We got them from this professor, Dr. Collins." And she was like, "That's actually a really smart model, but a very complicated model." And then in the next eight years, I start to realize, well, this is really complicated to have these credits, but it makes it so that the model is scalable. We've now worked with over 10,000 students, and honestly, students have the time and space to do it, and it's turned into a whole three-year experience, but it's because we work directly with institutions and in partnership with institutions.
Ray Magliozzi:
Hi, I am Ray Magliozzi, co-host of NPR's Car Talk. If you're working to solve the biggest challenges in higher education, you've come to the right podcast. And if you're looking for a student retention platform proven to get results, check out mainstay.com. I may be biased because the CEO of Mainstay just happens to be my son. So instead of taking my word for it, you can trust the research they've done with Georgia State, Brown, and Yale as proof that Mainstay improves enrollment, retention, and wellbeing. Visit mainstay.com/research to learn more.
Bridget Burns:
So, the person who reaches out at the institution to partner, is that a person who works in the career services space, or is it, could be any faculty?
Aimée Eubanks Davis:
It literally could be almost anywhere out of campus. We've had people reach out from different vantage points where it's often been someone who's been on the faculty end who said, "Hey, I'm at this school, I believe in what we're doing, and I just am watching my students not quite get the opportunities I thought they should and deserve to get." Sometimes it is career services. Often what I find is career services is just so under resourced. So, for example, the Braven model is really built off of the University of Chicago's career advancement model. And UChicago, at least according to their annual report in 2023, was a $10.3 billion endowed institution. And Meredith Daw is fantastic, has 7,000 of the most amazing students who mainly come from the top quartile earning families. She has 40 full-time people on her career services team, that doesn't even include the hundred professors and other people on the campus who advise students one-to-one.
There is not one school that we work with, whether that's San Jose State with 26,000 students, Rutgers Newark with 10,000 students, or Spelman College that's much tinier with 3,500 students. None of them have 40 full-time people combined working in career services. And so, I always say that people don't really understand how understaffed that area is, but often we also now are hearing from provosts and from presidents or chancellors themselves just saying, "You know what? This is a really smart model that actually has a lot of leverage, especially for schools that don't have the kind of endowment of a UChicago."
Bridget Burns:
Well, first off, that was a wild data points for me about UChicago. I mean, of course it plays into the mythology I have about private institutions and their wealth, which is being countered of course by the daily closing of private colleges that we're seeing. So, we can go there. But University of Central Florida, when we were doing our college-to-career project, I think they had three people for 70,000 students plus. And what you said about collaboration is super interesting because there's an organization called the Association for Collaborative Leadership, which is everyone who runs a collaborative – people like me. And I just remember going to my first ACL event and being shocked by how disproportionately female it was, and it turns out that almost all collaboratives are being run by women. And so, I do think it's one data point to support your point, but it is an interesting one that women are drawn to more collaborative spaces. That's my end of one example.
So, I want to now talk about you. And so, I'm super interested in the way that what informed you as a leader the most, because I'm hearing from this that you've had this vantage, you've had an opportunity to observe and work with incredible leaders up close. You also had this wild courage to just go out and take a paper and turn it into a massive organization that's impacting thousands of lives. I'm interested in where that comes from that you felt like you could do that, the nudge, and where did you get the model of leadership that gave you that boldness?
Aimée Eubanks Davis:
Yeah, I mean, I want to say again, I'm an accidental entrepreneur, and I really think one thing I say a lot to younger people, and I think this is really applicable to faculty members and staff and deans, et cetera in higher ed, is I think a lot of younger people earlier in their careers feel like they have to come out and start something huge. My story is one where I was literally teaching for seven years and for five of those years also running a community-based program in New Orleans. That was the reason that I started to meet hundreds of students over time. And then I go to Teach For America to the senior team there for 13 years. I'm a stayer. I'm actually not someone who moves very quickly out of whatever I'm doing, 'cause usually I fall in love with it, and I love it.
But actually, it was from that work and that kind of sustained work over time that I actually saw the challenge and also how you might solve it. So, at Teach For America, when I was overseeing all the people work, we started to do a lot to invest in how do you help develop early-stage talent. Because the organization at one point was growing at 36% a year, and we had no choice but to get very early-stage managers ready to manage and lead. And what I started to realize is that you could actually teach a person a whole lot, especially if they hadn't yet been disillusioned in some way. And so, the part of the Braven model that often gets overlooked is how much we actually do with employers. For every thousand students in the Braven experience, there are 17,000 volunteer hours that come in, and pretty much those folks are coaching teams of five to eight.
So, instead of having a lecture of 250 students, a team of five to eight, a cohort is put in place, and they are matched with a leadership coach. Why this is so important is: one, it actually breaks down the college experience from being sometimes overwhelming for many students to a really small cohort family. But also, it shatters the opportunity to have social capital connections into a world that most of our students do not know. Because all of a sudden, this coach is an older sister or a cousin or whomever who's like, "Oh, this team of students that I'm working with, they're really fantastic. My company" (whether that's a government company, organization or a nonprofit) "could benefit from their talents as interns or as full-time workers." And they also could see the benefit themselves. And so, what I started to realize was that this experience of actually developing young leaders came into play in the Braven model.
We had absolutely no money for two and a half years. We had one donor and almost went out of business. They were a K-12 donor. But actually being able to help earlier-stage professionals learn how to lead and manage a diverse team is a big part of the Braven model. But then, all of a sudden, we got them in as mock interviewers and then professional mentors that basically there's a learning model on the other side that creates a shared value for our employer partners and for people who are the volunteers as well. And so, that's something that I started to see again in this world of collaboration and partnership that was highly unusual as we, early on, were like, "We can't do it alone." We can't do it alone without higher ed partnerships, and we actually can't do it alone without employer partnerships that are very, very diverse from being, again, the government or nonprofits or for-profit companies.
And so, when I think about my boldness, I think the thing that was most bold that I did was said, "We are going to do this in partnership with others and we're going to go slow to go fast in order to build trusting relationships." And I had a lot of people say to me that that didn't make sense, that that didn't work, that you could never get anything done with collaboration and with partnership. And I was like, “I don't know how else you get it done unless we really decide that we're going to all work together on this.” I'll take the credit. And so, ten years later, we have been anywhere between 14 and 22 percentage points above the national average for our students coming out and earning an entire dollar instead of 66 cents on the dollar. And 76% of our students out-earn their parents in five semesters. But that's what we do in collaboration with our higher ed partners and with our employer partners.
Bridget Burns:
So, I often get a push to scale and go fast from people who work in the for-profit space or anyone who works with a lot of money. I totally get that. I'm wondering, and that resistance, that desire to go slow and to make it sustainable, especially when you come off, I know how scary it is, especially in those early years when you think you're going to run out of money running a nonprofit. It's terrifying. And it's like how do you not let that become integrated into your nervous system so that you are only focused on just keeping the lights on because then you're not going to advance bold change. So, I think that's a really helpful perspective into the evolution of your thinking as a leader. It's also totally relatable.
I do want to ask, you've been there 11 years, so I've been here ten, coming up on ten years. And one of the things that I often get asked about is you see some founders, and the challenge for me is always asking, "How long do you stay?" And on the other is, it's the most interesting work that exists. Everything else is so boring and not – if something else was as cool, I would be doing that. But this is the coolest, right? And I just wonder if you get that same kind of people asking questions about the tenure and what's next when it's like, “Dude, is this not good enough? It's amazing. The data's amazing. It's still going. Lots of people are employed. I don't understand.” Do you get that pressure a lot?
Aimée Eubanks Davis:
I do. And I find it interesting, because sometimes I just think you also need to know why you were planted on this earth, and this is what I'm really good at. I was really good at being a talent nerd and coaching early-stage talent, and I was really good at understanding what young people from more humble beginnings need and actually marrying those two things. And I have to say, I often get – like you do, I'm sure, as well – head-hunted. And I love when people call me and I'm like, "I'm not going anywhere. I can help give you names of people," but no one should actually really want me to go anywhere. Really, really good at this. And by the way, that means I'm not good at a whole bunch of other things. I just wouldn't be. I definitely wouldn't be as passionate. And so, I just really feel like the legacy I'm meant to leave – and honestly, I feel like I live every day – is the legacy of building for even an organization that should have never seen the light of day.
As you well know, there are not a lot of donors. Still, to this day, there are more than there were 11 years ago, actually, in the higher ed world, and especially going from higher ed into career. When I got started, all the donors even I knew from K-12 were in K-12, maybe they had gone into college access, but it really was almost always because the organization did something in K-12. And so, what I always realized is that Braven had to also build the courage of conviction around “this matters” to convince donors to see that it mattered to them and, honestly, to the country. And so, I don't ever really think about what I will do next. I'm always like, I don't know, somebody would be pushing me out in a little wheelchair. Hopefully someone will allow me to just stay around when I'm truly in my older years to ask me for some wisdom here and there.
But otherwise, I just really feel like I'm doing the thing that I'm truly best at. And I, to your point, don't feel like you hear other people in the for-profit world that start things and/or come in and lead things for a long time being asked when are they going to leave? I wonder when the last time Mark Zuckerberg got asked that question, right? And so, I don't know, it's just one – it brings me incredible joy and gratification, but then also, I have been able to see not only through the Fellows work, but also the incredible team at Braven. Just truly, the next generation of leaders emerge from everywhere. And I'm like, why would I stop doing that? I just don't know how I would spend my time otherwise.
Bridget Burns:
Also, there's other ways. So, for me, I think of it as the UIA has my strengths, it also has my weaknesses, and I'm interested in someone else's weaknesses. I'm interested in someone else's strengths. And that's something that you have to do with hiring. And it's about attracting talent to offset your skills. And if you've been at this long, you've clearly done that. You've built a team to offset your strengths and it's such a respected organization. So yeah, you've gotten through the hurdles that most nonprofits never get through.
Aimée Eubanks Davis:
Yeah, no, I tell people all the time, there are parts of Braven that I'm like, "You should ask me a little bit about..." I'll know at the highest level, but if you are really asking me to go deep on how we're integrating AI into our model, you need to talk to Moon Lee, our CTO, right? Or even in the world of employer partners, how we've been able to secure so many employer partnerships. I'm like, that's Daniel Alter or Lorraine Anderson-King. Or when I think about our work in any of our regions, Diana Phuong, our executive director in the Bay Area, she's a daughter of the Bay Area. Chelsea is a daughter of New York City. Shay grew up at Spelman as a college student, has lived in Atlanta forever. John Chaparro here in Chicago. I mean, all of these people are deeply rooted in these communities, Kia is from Delaware. I don't even try to pretend that I know, especially in the communities that we are, nearly as well as they do. Our latest executive director, Sam out in Newark, I mean she's worked in Newark for 20 years, taught so many students, knows far more about Newark than I ever will know. And I think that's one thing, as leaders, we always have to be humble about where we do have strengths and where we absolutely do not, and then build a team on around you.
Bridget Burns:
I want to shift a little bit back to your leadership style. I'm curious about – you've been around a lot of leaders you had a chance to see, and be one. I'm just wondering if you learned more from good examples of leadership or bad, because both have been informative. But if you had to guess, which one has helped you be more clear about either what to do or not to do? Do you feel like you've learned more from observing good or bad examples?
Aimée Eubanks Davis:
I would honestly probably say both, but more so than good or bad examples of leadership, I'd say a lot of times people think that nonprofits are not businesses. Nonprofits are businesses, they're just a different tax code. And from sitting on a number of boards, I have absolutely seen over time how important it is to make sure that the business that you're in as a nonprofit, actually, is truly sustainable and is meeting a need that's out there in the world or pivots to meet that need. But when I think about incredible leaders, I've seen some incredible leaders like Wendy Kopp at Teach For America. I've been coached by her husband, Richard Barth, who helped grow and lead the KIPP Foundation for many years. They're very different. I mean truly very different human beings. I always joke like I've been working for one or the other a long time now, but how they actually engage as leaders are different.
I will say even on the Braven team, going back to the team, bringing in someone like LaNiesha Cobb Sanders, who oversees all of our product work, she's actually very different in the sense of we both grew up in Teach For America together, but on different sides of Teach For America. And so, her strengths are far greater than mine are in terms of our product and how we're delivering our product in a hybrid kind of way. And then Ed Herrera, he's our CTO and operations officer. He came out of, like, BMW and the world of retail. So different than what I have come from. But that said, what I've always learned is how important it is for any organization to have core values and then be very disciplined about the goals.
And going back to what you mentioned earlier, I think in nonprofits we get a lot of push to scale, to scale, and I'm like, “Do you know what you're scaling to and why? And do you have actual metrics and outcomes?” Because I actually think without that pressure, I think we see far more nonprofits doing even better over time and making even more impact over time. But we often don't get the kind of dollars that for-profit companies get to either do R&D and or to do straight up innovation work, which I always find so interesting. And yet, we're usually solving some of the most intractable problems.
Bridget Burns:
I do feel like we sometimes resort to thinking that scale is the test of whether your model works, but it's not. It's a completely different measure of whether or not your model – It's a question about growth and approach and speed. But I've seen a lot of things scale that it's at the cost of something, whereas I see depth, and there's just not enough appreciation about sustainability for me. I'm just like, I just never want to be back in that space of worrying about paying people's salaries, worrying about keeping the lights on, because I think I make bad decisions. I make short, not smart, not strategic. That's what I want to keep the organization out of. And scale will pull you out of that sustainability space, and it pulls you into this resource, almost grabby kind of mindset, which I don't think it's the impact.
Aimée Eubanks Davis:
No, and also I think especially when you think about higher education, context also really matters. Sometimes when people are asking you to go so fast, they're overlooking the importance of understanding the context of the place in which we want to partner. So, when we started to partner with Delaware State, and Kia came on to be our executive director, she deeply knew Delaware. Or we are starting an innovation of looking at Arkansas. And the person Melvin, who's come on there, he went to University of Arkansas, Pine Bluff. He is a son of Pine Bluff. He grew up in Pine Bluff. I went to Pine Bluff for all day and was like, clearly, even if I am Black, as is he, this is a different part of the U.S. This is a different context. We need to bring in someone who has the context also. And that almost always means that you're going to go slow to go fast in order to make sure that you truly have deep respect and partnership with faculty, with staff, with deans, provosts, presidents, chancellors, et cetera.
Bridget Burns:
Yes, I love it. And I was just thinking about, we're talking a little bit more in nonprofit inside baseball, but I see all these other organizations like JFF, incredible scale, right? A hundred million a year. A hundred. Think about that. I mean wild, the pressure, the pressure, I'm like, “Oh man, Maria's amazing.” There's room for every model. But I think that this scale growing deep and quality is also – it's a version of scale.
So, all right, so here's about you. I want to know what's the most surprising thing about your career? I have a feeling you wouldn't imagine you'd be where you are, but is there a particular juncture? Maybe it's even when you become executive vice president at TFA or senior vice – That's a huge, massive talk about scale organization. What has been the most surprising part of your journey?
Aimée Eubanks Davis:
The most surprising part of my journey is how I could have never predicted it, literally. That I did Teach For America, even had everything to do with wanting to pay it forward into the Black community because of a deep understanding that I had from being in a family that really did experience economic mobility and really wanting to just pay it forward. I just wanted to do something of service with myself coming out of undergrad. And fun fact, I am not the biggest kid person. So that I started my career as a teacher is laughable at best. And I have three children. I love my three children, but my husband is far better with little babies and younger kids. His mom ran a daycare out of their house for many, many years.
But I really was called to just have a purpose, at least initially. And then I was like, “Okay, so then I'm going to be an attorney.” Because my parents, who had given everything to get me through college, were like, "What do you mean you're going to start your career at education? This is not what the plan was. You have to go make money." And so, I applied to some really great law schools, got into them and then did this really funny thing that I'm sure you couldn't probably pull off nowadays, which was I then held seat deposits at multiple of the top law schools. Well, I just still couldn't get out of running this nonprofit. I was running and teaching and just my students – and I just love them and I just wanted to see them, that first group of sixth graders, get to the doors of college. But basically, what I keep coming back to is there was a woman who took me to lunch who had gone to my alma mater, and she actually said to me, "You know, what I've seen at this point in my life is that my friends that have taken the path less traveled are actually happier and more gratified in their careers."
And I just think I got super lucky that I realized I was good at something, that I really loved education, even though you could have never predicted me being a teacher, and how that just then allowed my career to evolve over time. Now, that said, did I get incredibly fortunate that Teach For America was growing like it was and that Wendy Kopp happened to take notice of me? Absolutely. But I think had I been so dogged about, oh, it's going to be this, this, and this, I'm going to go from teaching then to law school, I would never be here. It was that I allowed myself the time and the space to just really work hard on problems that I cared about, and this woman told me, "And the money will come." I mean, that was really my parents fear –
Bridget Burns:
Truth.
Aimée Eubanks Davis:
– was that I was going to end up back on their couch. But yeah, I mean, you get super passionate about something, you just learn how to make it work for you financially.
Bridget Burns:
Yeah, I agree. That's great. So, I want to ask about the advice that others have given you that has been most helpful. It sounds like you get a front-row seat to see a lot of people coaching your students. You get to probably capture a lot in that space. But I'm wondering, in your journey beyond that advice that we just shared, is there any other piece that you find yourself most often repeating to others that has been valuable for you?
Aimée Eubanks Davis:
I would say what I find myself repeating to others, but actually usually repeating to myself first, is by my first manager Dr. Tony Recasner, who was the principal of my school, but he was a very untraditional principal. In that, he was a psychologist by background who happened to start a school. And when I say he started a school, it was actually first in the extension of another school. Then over time, it ends up becoming actually the first charter school in the state of Louisiana because it was before all that legislation is passed. But basically, I had a parent, rightfully so, who went in and complained to him about me being a very novice teacher. She was absolutely right and how she really felt like I needed more training and more mentorship and more support. And so, he calls me in to give me my performance review and he was like, "Well, what do you think of this?" And I was like, "Well, I think she's right." But then I list off the 500 other reasons why I thought she was maybe not as right as she was. And he actually said, "You know what I want you to do? I want you to listen, listen again, listen one more time, and then respond." Because his whole point was that even if you don't agree with everything this parent might be saying, there's probably portions of what she's saying that are right, but you're refuting it because you just can't even get it into your head that you're not right. And that's something that I definitely have tried very hard to do is to really listen and to encourage my team to listen, especially if you are going to be in deep partnership with people. And if you're going to say, in order to go slow to go fast, we're going to go together. That means you actually have to really listen, and sometimes you know what this person is and we need to go with this. I do not know the most.
Bridget Burns:
Yeah, I think it's a struggle for most people to – especially if feedback is negative, right?
Aimée Eubanks Davis:
[inaudible 00:35:48], yes.
Bridget Burns:
You are set up physically to kind of go out and have that strong exterior. But someone once told me that feedback is just a tell about how other people see the world. And if you're willing to listen, you're basically getting the ultimate inside scoop on exactly how they view the world. But it also means that if you tap into curiosity instead of defensiveness, you can be more successful. And also, it makes it so that you're less feeling like it's about you, because it's not. It's about their worldview, and you need to understand it and not be in your defensiveness to be able to use it.
Aimée Eubanks Davis:
And what can you learn and then apply? Because really what happened was that when I came back the second year, I was a far better teacher. I did take in what this parent was saying, and I was like, “Okay, I do need stronger assistance. I do need to get more mentorship from Brenda Benoit. I do need to do all these other things to make myself a stronger teacher. And that's really what I think that advice really taught me.
Bridget Burns:
That's great. So, my last question, I know we have to run. Is there a book around leadership or professional development that you find yourself most often suggesting to other people because it was useful for you?
Aimée Eubanks Davis:
Yeah. I mean, I would say that there are many books that I feel like I've read over time that have been super great. So, I am drawn in general to the stories of leaders and how they come to be, whether that's Michael Dell books or books about incredible women who've become leaders in ways that were unorthodox or you didn't see it coming, like Margaret Thatcher over in England. But ultimately, I often go back to the book that really inspires me. It's a little bit of what I was just saying around really putting yourself in other people's shoes, which is To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. And it's definitely a book that I think has come, as it should, under great controversy in terms of when it was created, all that. But the biggest, biggest lesson in that book – and I taught it so many times as a teacher, so clearly, that's why I'm also very enamored by this book – is actually about putting yourself in someone else's shoes and walking in those shoes and how important it is to really try to do that. But I'm often drawn now more towards books of leaders and how they've made it a rise that seemed to be completely impossible and that you could never tell was coming. But I always go back to “Put yourself in someone else's shoes, really try to walk in those shoes before you pass judgment.”
Bridget Burns:
I think very strong advice for us to wrap the day. So Aimée, thank you so much for being here. This has been really helpful, not just to learn – One, I just want people to understand what Braven is, because I feel like I have a unique window into the non-profit college access and success space where you and I are in a lot of the same rooms, but then I'm also in these rooms with institutions who might not know about Braven at all. And so, understanding that there are solutions out there that have data that shows they work and can partner with institutions and has a track record across all kinds of institutions, because I think this is a space where campuses struggle. And I think that inventing the wheel is probably not the best solution, especially when somebody already is doing an excellent job. So, I'm excited to introduce them to Braven, but also I think that your journey has been fascinating, and thank you so much for sharing with us today.
Aimée Eubanks Davis:
Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Bridget. I'm a huge fan of University Innovation Alliance and all that you've done to lead in this space, so I really appreciate you having me on this podcast. I'm also a big fan of Inside Higher Education. I'm always reading the publication, as is my team.
Bridget Burns:
Awesome. Well, thanks so much.