Barbara Davis
Barbara and Marvin Davis
Barbara Davis was born in New York City and graduated from Adelphi University in Garden City, Long Island in 1951. She married Marvin Davis the same year, and they moved to Denver, Colorado where they lived until 1985 when they moved to Beverly Hills, California. Mr. Davis passed away in 2004.
Mrs. Davis has five children, 16 grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.
Barbara Davis, with her husband, Marvin Davis, established the Children’s Diabetes Foundation in 1977 in Denver, Colorado, as a not-for-profit organization dedicated solely to research on childhood diabetes and to the provision of the best possible clinical and education programs for children with type 1 (insulin-dependent) diabetes. The foundation’s mission is to raise funds to support programs at the Barbara Davis Center for Childhood Diabetes where more than 6,000 children and young adults with type 1 diabetes from across America and around the world currently receive care. Since its inception, the Foundation has raised close to $100 million to support diabetes programs and research through events such as The Carousel of Hope, chaired by Mrs. Davis.
Barbara Davis is Chairman of the Board of the Children’s Diabetes Foundation and also serves on the board of the Joslin Diabetes Center (Boston, Massachusetts), Cedars-Sinai Medical Center (Los Angeles, California), Eisenhower Medical Center (Rancho Mirage, California) and is a member of the Blue Ribbon Panel of the Los Angeles Music Center. In November 1992, Mrs. Davis was honored in New York with the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation International 1992 Promise Ball Humanitarian Award. In 1995 she received an Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters from the University of Colorado. In 2004 she received the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation’s Angel Award in Los Angeles (given in 2003 to Nancy Reagan).
She has worked in unification with the major diabetes organizations throughout the United States to focus on care, education, prevention and the cure for diabetes.
