Introduction
Renée Davis was twenty when a spiritual gifts quiz told her she was, above all else, a servant. She was furious. Everyone else in the room had landed on teacher, prophet, evangelist. She got service and hospitality, and to a nineteen-year-old with big ambitions, that sounded like a consolation prize.
Twenty years on, running Out The Box and Black At Work, two organisations that between them have reached thousands of black professionals and creatives across the UK, she has come round to a different view entirely. Service isn't the boring option. It's the whole point.
Her conversation on Everyday Leadership traces the line from a teenager writing stories in Birmingham, through a near dropout at university, a lonely first year in London, and a blog she started because her lecturers couldn't grasp what she was writing about, to a founder who now defines leadership not by title or visibility, but by what happens to the people who pass through your hands.
Person First, Not Title First
Asked who Renée Davis is, she doesn't lead with founder, writer or journalist, even though she has earned every one of those titles. She leads with daughter, friend, sister, auntie.
"Career and business goes like this," she said, gesturing up and down, "and I think you always need to have that thing that underpins you." The titles come after. What underpins her is being a person first and, running alongside that, being someone who champions other people. She traces that instinct back to her father, who used to describe her as caring when her younger brothers called it bossy. Same behaviour, different lens. She kept the caring version.
A Fighting Spirit Forged Early
Renée is open that her teenage years weren't easy. Family circumstances during that period, she says, built the fighting spirit that has carried her ever since. That spirit was tested hardest at university, where she deferred twice, retook modules over two summers, and came close to walking away more than once.
What kept her in the room was less a single decision than a pattern she'd already learned to trust. She had watched her family go through hard seasons before and come out the other side, sometimes through people, sometimes through what she calls miraculous, sometimes through circumstances simply changing. "When you have both, the rough and the smooth, and you learn to navigate life with both in tandem, when you're in the middle of something you can always refer back and say: we made it before, we'll make it again."
She also credits something more practical: distance from distraction. Retaking modules over quiet summers in Leicester, with no parties and no one around, gave her the focus she needed. And she leaned on people close to her rather than staying stuck in her own head, a habit she still recommends. "If you come out of your head and speak to people, they can shift perspective and reality for you."
The Blog Born From Being Boxed In
The origin story of Out The Box has nothing to do with a business plan. At university, studying media and journalism, Renée kept writing about black community, culture and history, and her lecturers kept telling her she'd misunderstood the brief. She hadn't. They simply didn't know the subject matter well enough to mark it. "I felt like they were boxing me in," she said, "and that's why the name came around." She started the blog to protect her craft from that misunderstanding, not to build a platform.
That instinct to write about her own community rather than something easier was never really a choice. "That was the thing that came naturally, the thing I was the most in tune with, the thing I cared about more than anything." She'd grown up watching black people portrayed well, through church, through family businesses, and wanted her writing to do the same.
Saying Yes To London She Never Wanted
Renée was adamant she wasn't moving to London. She wanted to build a career in Birmingham, no matter what anyone told her about where journalism jobs actually were. Then a mentor sent her a job listing at the Salvation Army's national publication, and she says she heard God tell her, as soon as she saw the application, that it was hers.
The lead-up to the interview was chaos. Her father's car broke down the night before he was due to drive her down for moral support. She used her last driving-lesson money on a train ticket instead, and by the time she reached her cousin's flat in tears, she'd ripped up the interview letter. It was her cousin who taped it back together and told her, mid-prayer in the next room, that she was going. A stranger on the train the next morning gave her directions to the venue. She got the job, and moved to London within two weeks, at twenty-one.
The first year was harder than the win suggested it would be. The job felt like living her dream: real interviews, real access, a title she'd worked for. But her social life hadn't caught up with her career, and she describes London bluntly as a lonely city in that first year, with friends scattered across a city too big to casually cross. What changed it was routine: living with her cousin, finding a church a couple of university friends already attended, and eventually settling into a home in South East London for eight and a half years.
From Articles To A Room Full Of People
Out The Box sat dormant as an idea for three years while Renée was comfortable in her career. The nudge that moved it from private conviction to public platform came after the 2011 riots and the death of Mark Duggan. Watching the coverage, she felt told to portray young black people in a better light than the news was giving them, and to showcase the ones doing genuinely creative, ambitious work.
She launched Out The Box as a proper website in 2014, telling the stories of young, inspirational people of colour, deliberately outside the two lanes, sport and music, that most media coverage stuck to. The response surprised her. A friend messaged her directly: don't let me see that you've stopped doing this.
Events weren't part of the original plan either. They came from a conversation with a friend about how to grow the platform beyond what articles alone could do. Renée cold-emailed Google Campus in Shoreditch, on the single condition that any event had to be free for the startup community, and ran her first one in September 2015. Seventy tickets, all free, all gone. "I stood there and thought, I've done it. I don't have any intention of stopping now." Ten years on, Out The Box has reached over 5,000 people through events, workshops and stories, and Renée has since moved back to Birmingham to build the next stage closer to home.
Why Black At Work Exists
Black At Work grew out of a pattern Out The Box kept hearing from its community: being black in the workplace, and the racism, microaggressions and stereotypes that come with navigating it, was the recurring theme. The Black Lives Matter uprising accelerated the need for somewhere to take it.
Renée built Black At Work as a safe space, but deliberately not just a venting space. It offers practical advice and solutions from professionals, alongside allyship training for organisations that want to do better. The order matters to her. "We always want it to be a space that's for black employees first, and not the other way around." She's clear it isn't black employees' job to teach organisations how not to be racist, only to point them toward how to learn, and organisations that fund and support the space rather than expecting it to do their work for them are the ones getting it right.
Spotting Misalignment Before It Wins
Running multiple organisations for over a decade hasn't spared Renée from doubt. She's had periods, including one within the last year, of genuinely questioning whether to continue. What pulls her back, she says, is remembering why she started, and checking whether she's actually misaligned rather than just tired.
Her checklist for misalignment is physical before it's mental. Feeling resentful. Dreading daily tasks she used to look forward to. Getting snappy over small things. She's leaning increasingly on what she calls a somatic check, paying attention to how her body reacts to a task or a decision, not just what her mind says about it.
Leadership, Redefined As Service
Asked directly how she defines leadership, Renée doesn't hesitate: servitude. She traces the discomfort with that word back to a spiritual gifts quiz she took as a teenager, where she scored highest on service and was disappointed, because service sounded boring next to teacher or evangelist.
Years of running things have flipped that entirely. To her, leadership now means asking how you serve and equip people so that when they leave you, or leave whatever you've built, they're better off than when they arrived. It doesn't mean putting yourself last or refusing good positions for yourself. It means, in her words, taking yourself out of the equation. "You're the vessel that things will run through. It's not about you." In practice, that shows up as refusing to hoard opportunities or connections, actively pointing people toward roles and people she isn't chasing herself, and being genuinely unbothered by watching people she's mentored overtake her.
