Lee Davis is a work in progress.
Well, more like several works in progress. He has a consulting company, a sports and entertainment marketing company, has partnered in various housing and economic development ventures, and that’s just his for-profit juggling act.
He is also a life coach with the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health’s Violence Prevention Project. It’s similar to work he did 15 years ago with Rashad Byrdsong at Community Empowerment Association, but Davis’ approach is different, because, well, he is different.
That’s part of what he’ll be talking about during a panel discussion on the social detriments caused by poverty, violence and food insecurity following a presentation of Tammy Thompson’s film, “We Wear The Mask,” at the School of Public Health, Sept. 28. The event will be held at 2 p.m. at 130 DeSoto St. in Oakland, inside lecture room A115.
“It’s like I’ve come full circle,” he said. “All the violence prevention stuff, and mediation—but it’s newer. The social media presence adds a whole new element—I mean people are getting shot over a beef on Facebook. So, we have to monitor that.”
Davis didn’t start out trying to get kids and their families out of the drug, violence, poverty and prison cycle that affects so many in the region. In the mid 1990s, he was building his own music promotion and recording business in his hometown of Braddock.
The only problem was that kind of start-up is cash-intensive, so he built it with revenue from another business—dealing drugs. It almost worked.
“You know, I’m thinking it’ll get to where it’s self-sustaining and I can stop the other stuff and be totally legit,” he said. “Sometimes I have to laugh looking back at the stupid things I did.”
That particular bit of stupidity cost him three years in state prison. When he came out of prison, he did some odd jobs before hooking up with Byrdsong. He said CEA reignited his entrepreneurial spirit, and he’s been at it ever since. But in that, he has found a new way to reach the kids he’s trying to intervene with.
“It’s about the jobs connected to the jobs,” he said. “When I go into the community, kids want to know about the entertainment business and sports business, and I can tell them all the things that go into it—marketing, IT, computer graphics. You can’t just say, ‘here, go into this program.’ These guys want to be hands-on. I can show them. I can have that conversation.”
Davis has also helped ex-offenders take stock of their skills and build successful businesses from that—and they, in turn, are hiring others who need that same hand-up.
“In fact, that’s what one the nonprofits I’m a partner in is called, A Hand Up LLC,” he said. “I’m trying to inspire people to be more.”
But in addition to his business partners, it takes a lot of nonprofit partners to affect real change, partners like First Step Recovery in McKeesport, Richard Garland at Pitt, and Greater Valley Community Services in the old Salvation Army building in Braddock.
“Back 15 years ago, doing this intervention, the biggest obstacle was probably the easy money. These days, it’s not that simple,” Davis said. “These kids have addiction issues linked to depression, other mental health—and there are more females involved in this. So you see them getting shot up. There are super unstable family situations—there are thousands of kids who are living on couches, or with girlfriends or in abandoned houses. Then you add guys coming back from prison with no plan into the mix—it just adds to the chaos.”
That’s why Davis works to show people they can change their situations.
“There are 50 million ways you can use your skills,” he said. “I’m showing them. In sports, there’s marketing, computer graphic, animators, being an agent, branding and endorsement deals. I tell them I tried this, and it failed—but I moved on. You got to keep pushing.”
And Davis is. His current push is a new subscription streaming service for independent filmmakers called IndyReels.
“I keep running into independent movie and music artists that don’t know where to go to fund and sell their work,” he said. “It’ll be like Netflix. I have guys in India building the platform now. We should launch in 2019.”
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