Scholar Entries - Hispanic Lawyers Scholarship Fund of Illinois

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Are you a past recipient of an Hispanic Lawyers Scholarship Fund award?

Name

Khadijah Davis

Current Mailing Address

2031 Maywill Street
Richmond, VA 23230
United States
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If mailing address is temporary, expected date when current mailing address is no longer valid

07/01/2026

Phone

(785) 408-0008

Connection to Illinois

Grandmother born in Chicago (Cook County); family migrated to Kansas for work opportunities

In what city do you intend to practice law upon graduation?

undecided

Name of Law School

University of Richmond School of Law

Class year

1st year law student

Full Time or Part Time Student?

Full Time

Date you began attending THIS law school

08/12/2025

Anticipated Graduation Date

05/13/2028

Current GPA

Unknown

Law School Honors, Awards or Special Recognitions

National Conference of Black Lawyers Legacy Project
Other awards/recognitions are not known until January 2026

Name of Undergraduate Institution

Washington University in St. Louis

Degree (BA, BSE, etc.) and Concentration/Major

BA: Global Health and Environment; Psychological and Brain Sciences (Cognitive Neuroscience)

Undergraduate Graduation Date

05/18/2019

GPA

3.3

Undergraduate Honors, Awards, or Special Recognitions

Lambda Alpha National Anthropological Honor Society
Excellence in Anthropology Senior Award
Frankie Muse Freeman Public Service Award
Sophomore Residential Advisor and Summer Residential Advisor

Were you employed in 2025?

yes

If yes, please identify your employer(s).

Senior Policy Consultant, Aurrera Health Group (2022-2025)
Co-Founder and CEO, Michael H. Davis Family Foundation (2024 - present) (unpaid position)

What was your immediate family’s (including you and your spouse or domestic partner, if applicable) estimated income from all sources for the 2025 Tax Year?

36800

Do you expect to be employed in 2026?

yes

If yes, please identify your employer(s).

Co-Founder and CEO, Michael H. Davis Family Foundation (2024 - present) (unpaid position)

Please estimate your immediate family’s (including you and your spouse or domestic partner, if applicable) income from all sources for the 2026 Tax year

Please estimate your parent's average annual household income over the last five years

N/A

Do your parents own or rent their home? Please describe, if necessary

N/A

Describe your parents' health insurance situation. Do they have employer-sponsored health insurance, health insurance through the exchange, or no health insurance?

N/A

LIST below your total EXPENSES for attending law school for ONE YEAR (Please refer to example in FAQs)

Total Tuition Cost $

57700

Books Cost $

1200

Fees Cost $

1590

Housing Cost $

19000

Food Cost $

6000

Other Costs $ (describe)

3760 (transportation)

Total Expenses $ (add above entries)

89250

LIST below your total FUNDING sources you plan to use to pay for these expenses (Please refer to example in FAQs)

Student Loans $

70000

Scholarships and Grants $

Work Study, if any $

4000

Personal Contribution (Savings/Employment) $

3000

Family Contribution $ (include parents, spouse, partner, etc.)

Other Sources $ (describe)

Total Funding $ (add above entries)

77000

For 2Ls and 3Ls, what is your current TOTAL loan debt from the previous law school years?

N/A

Please list any community service activities with which you have been involved in the last ten years, paying particular attention to activities in support of the Hispanic community. For each activity, please include the dates of your participation, a short description of the organization and the community they serve, and a description of the activity you performed to help them. (Please read FAQs before completing)

Volunteer, Children's Hospital (August 2015- May 2016): The Children's Hospital in St. Louis provides care to children throughout the region. As a playroom volunteer, I would play with children as they recover (sometimes from major surgeries), deliver toys to their rooms, and sit with the children and parents during difficult moments. While I did not have control over the children residing in the hospital, a substantial percentage of the children identified as Hispanic. My relationship-building with the children and parents resulted in my receiving the community service award through WashU.

Director of Advocacy, GlobeMed (January 2017 - May 2018): As the inaugural chair, I pushed the WashU faculty and students to engage with St. Louis residents on topics that included minoritized populations’ access to healthcare. Outside of raising over $19,500 for a partner organization, my team also mobilized the undergraduate chapter around grassroots organization and social justice efforts (half of which resulted in partnering with Casa de Salud, an organization focusing on immigrant and refugee healthcare).

Political Fellow, McCaskill for Missouri (May 2018 - November 2018): This campaign was for Senator McCaskill's re-election campaign. As the sole political fellow in the office, I was responsible for research and community engagement. I developed and implemented Senator McCaskill's college tour, where she spoke with various college communities about issues they faced. I also regularly attended the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce Metro St. Louis as both an Afro-Latina living in St. Louis and as a representative for the campaign. Through my interactions, we were able to integrate more Spanish deliverables and bring more multilingual staff on board.

SOURCE: Connections Community Consultant (October 2021 - January 2022): SOURCE is a community-connection office at Johns Hopkins. The office connects local organizations with student volunteers who take on research and community engagement work that the organizations would not otherwise have time to complete. For my project, I worked with EndSideOut to further enhance their outreach programs by conducting literature reviews, writing grants, and working on intervention implementation.

Student Experiences Chair, Johns Hopkins Diversity Leadership Council (July 2022 - June 2024): Appointed members of the Diversity Leadership Council provide guidance and strategy to President Daniels and Hopkins leadership. For the student experiences committee, I drafted committee and council reports, partnered with student groups across the Hopkins divisions to understand why they may depart from Hopkins or why their experience was subpar, and briefed the leadership team quarterly.

JHU Carey Community Consulting Lab (February 2023 - April 2023): The Community Consulting Lab partners students with business leaders representing and serving marginalized communities. Through this 8-week accelerator, I assisted businesses with financial reports, English-to-Spanish document conversions, development of Standard Operating Procedures, and social media strategies to diversify their audiences.

Student Assembly Advancement Committee, American Public Health Association (November 2023 - November 2024): The Student Assembly oversees the public health initiatives at all college campuses that have APHA chapters. As co-lead of the Advancement Committee, I oversaw the distribution of the Trong Award and the scholarship that accompanied it. I also partnered with the Black and Hispanic Caucuses to increase knowledge of the scholarship and general APHA scholarships for students and recent graduates.

Volunteer, Substance Abuse Prevention Coalition (April 2024 - August 2025): The Substance Abuse Prevention Coalition provides services to school-aged youth and their families. I assisted with and led training sessions on the dangers of Fentanyl and other opioids for students who disclosed that they were using drugs and/or were found using drugs on their high school campus. Many of the students were first-generation students, and their parents did not speak English. This meant we had to find new ways of communicating the information and making it accessible for parents who may not have had any interaction with the topic. Additionally, we were present while the police department came to talk to the students, to help alleviate concerns parents had, as many of them were concerned about potential deportation.

Co-Founder/President and CEO, Michael H. Davis Family Foundation (June 2024 - Present): The Michael H. Davis Family Foundation was established to honor the life and legacy of my father. Through the foundation, we can award scholarships and year-long mentorship to students throughout Kansas. As my grandmother and great-grandparents on my father’s side are Mexican (my dad is first generation) and Kansas has a large Hispanic population, I take pride in bringing my love for my culture and community to the work we do. We encounter many first-generation Hispanic students, like my father, and it has been gratifying to be part of their journey after high school.

Please provide a statement describing your background and focus your statement on your reasons for pursuing a legal career and your legal career goals. This statement is important. Please give it appropriate attention. (min. 1000 characters) (Please read FAQs before completing)

When discussing the American dream, we often highlight how some can, through immense work and determination, rise from a disastrous circumstance to opulence. This narrative is offered as both promise and prescription: if we work hard enough, we will be treated better. While well-intentioned, this belief is a double-edged sword. My pursuit of the American dream, and its limits, shaped my desire to become a healthcare attorney and advocate for communicates historically relegated to the margins of our systems.

I am the descendant of formerly enslaved people and Hispanic immigrants who persisted despite systemic barriers. For my family, pursuing the American dream often required quiet endurance. Personally, it also meant being in spaces where I was ashamed to eat Mexican food in front of my non-Latino peers as a child, navigating complex institutions alone because few people in my hometown completed high school, and hesitating to disclose that my extended family relied on Medicaid or Medicare because of immense judgment. In my hometown, success came with an unspoken cost: separating oneself from their culture(s) to be perceived as deserving of opportunities. An unspoken belief that community members unknowingly upheld.

Once you get older and start to unlearn these sentiments, there is another layer of shame you feel. This type of shame, and the associated guilt, is not often discussed within Hispanic communities where sacrifice and silence are frequently framed as virtues. I share this experience here because it is through these experiences that I gained a deep sense of how stigma, race, and systemic injustices disproportionately affected Black and Brown communities. From an early age, I saw how healthcare institutions treated Spanish-speaking families, low-income patients, and immigrants as burdens rather than people. I learned that care was often conditional, mediated by policies few understood or had the power to challenge. This understanding is what draws me to healthcare law. For families like mine—families navigating language barriers, public benefits, and stigma—legal protection can mean the difference between receiving care with dignity and enduring neglect in silence.

Today, I am someone who understands that resilience alone cannot correct structural injustice. Meaningful change requires legal knowledge, intentional advocacy, lived experience, and an unwillingness to accept inequity as inevitable. As I complete my legal education and pursue a career as a healthcare attorney, I hope to advocate for policies that treat access to care as a right rather than a privilege. I want to help build systems where patients are seen as whole people—where language, race, and immigration status do not dictate the quality of care received. I draw my strength from my ancestry and from the Hispanic communities that raised me—communities that continue to give, endure, and hope despite persistent barriers. Honoring that legacy means refusing to accept inequity as inevitable. It means using the law to protect those who have long been expected to endure harm quietly. In doing so, I hope to contribute to a more just vision of the American dream—one that does not require cultural erasure in exchange for opportunity.

Please upload a copy of your financial award letter labeled as follows: LastName.FirstName.FinAwardLtr*

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Davis.Khadijah.FinAwardLtr.pdf

Please upload a copy of your resume labeled as follows: LastName.FirstName.Resume*

Please upload a copy of your law school transcript labeled as follows: LastName.FirstName.LSTranscript*