We partnered with Planned Parenthood Texas Votes (PPTV), initially on the search for an Executive Director. PPTV is the nonpartisan policy, advocacy and political arm of the three Planned Parenthood affiliates in Texas.
The search resulted in the promotion of Shellie Hayes-McMahon and Drucilla Tigner, PPTV’s Deputy Executive Directors, leading operations and programs, respectively, as the organization’s new Co-Executive Directors, and the recruitment of former State Senator Wendy Davis as Senior Advisor.
As Senior Advisor, Davis focuses on strategic planning, development, and leadership cultivation.
Davis was once a teen mom living in poverty who went on to graduate from Harvard Law School (after getting her higher education start at Tarrant County Community College). She has long been an advocate for creating a more fair, just and equal world in which we all can thrive.
Davis served in the Texas Senate for 6 years after beating a 16 year incumbent in a Republican district. Prior to that she served for 9 years on the Fort Worth City Council.
After conducting a filibuster in the Texas Senate in 2011 to stop $5.4B in cuts to our public schools, David rose to prominence when she stood for 13 hours in her pink sneakers two years later, filibustering a law that threatened to close almost all abortion clinics in Texas.
After attempting to become Texas’ first Democratic governor in decades in 2014, Davis later founded the nonprofit, Deeds Not Words (a phrase borrowed from the suffragette movement), to activate young women as advocates for gender equity because she has always believed that “talk is cheap” and that only through our concerted efforts and actions will we create the gender equal world that our daughters and granddaughters deserve.
Davis was the Democratic nominee for the 21st Congressional district in 2020.
She recently sued the state of Texas to block civil and criminal penalties of individuals and organizations working to provide access to abortion care in the post-Roe landscape, and she founded a fund to support the civil and criminal penalties that they might incur – DefendTheFrontline.Org.