Alia Harvey Quinn has spent a decade raising millions and advocating for an end to community gun violence.
Now, the FORCE Detroit founder and executive director says she is stepping away from the community organization to invest in herself and her family.
The mother of three said she launched the grassroots project in 2015 primarily to engage returning citizens and millennials around stopping community gun violence. Back then, she said, one of the main goals was to get public funding for the people and organizations doing the prevention work in Detroit.
Harvey Quinn has long advocated for sustainable resources for gun violence interruption, which the city and several grassroots organizations now call Community Violence Intervention (CVI).
The Detroit group is among a handful to receive funding from the city under an initiative dubbed “ShotStoppers,” which invests in community-driven methods to disrupt violence, or prevent it from happening in the first place.
In her time leading FORCE, Harvey Quinn has helped to raise $10 million for CVI programming and exits as violent crime in Detroit has been trending down and the city marked its lowest homicide rate since 1966.
Her last day as executive director is Dec. 31. Starting Jan. 1, Dujuan Kennedy, FORCE Detroit’s director of public health and safety, will take over.
On the eve of this transition, Harvey Quinn and Kennedy talked with BridgeDetroit about the organization’s journey and what’s next.
The following was lightly edited for length and clarity.
BridgeDetroit: Alia, you’ve led FORCE Detroit for a decade, how did you know that now was the time to step away?
Alia Harvey Quinn: Well, the goal was actually complete. We challenged ourselves long ago to find public funding for community-led violence prevention. This was before the term CVI came out, and we met the goal. Then, in evaluating what all had been accomplished, I just didn’t feel like setting the next goal was something that I should do.
BD: How did that battle to get public funding go, and who were some of your early allies?
AHQ: It was a much longer battle than I thought it would be. Originally, we had to choose between the organizing and advocacy and investing in the grassroots organizations and doing the coalition building work, so that when the advocacy opportunities presented themselves, the grassroots groups that were attempting to lead the work without funding would be ready. And, of course, we chose the latter.
Along the journey, we were able to build up an amazing amount of support from community leaders, folks like (Detroit Board of Police Commission Chairman) Darryl Woods, public official allies emerged, folks like (Interim Detroit Police Chief) Todd Bettison, state Sen. (Sylvia) Santana, (State Rep.) Donovan McKinney and lots of other folks.
BD: Alia, what do you look back on as the biggest victory of your time with FORCE Detroit, and what is something that you wanted to accomplish that didn’t quite happen?
Harvey Quinn: Back in 2015 there were six young men targeting couples and robbing them, and I found out that it was a group of young Black men. But they were still children, and they were children that needed firm parent-structured environments, they still needed a community that loved them…There were a bunch of people who responded – Malik Shabazz, New Era Detroit, Detroit 300 – these are all the same groups that we’ve been able to help them fund and scale the work that really called me to show up in the first place.
It’s amazing to me that you can, as a community organizer with passion and a bunch of nonprofit training, get together with five people in the basement of a church and dream that big and make it happen. That’s brilliant and amazing to me.
When I think of the failures, I think about personal ones. I think about the amount of sacrifice the job took. And, if I could collect some of those hours, would I have been able to spend more time with my children? Would I have been able to prevent certain things in my own personal world from happening? We pretty much achieved our professional outward goals, but we did so at a great personal cost.
BD: Dujuan, how did you meet Alia?
DK: I got out of prison in May of 2019 and, three weeks after, my brother, a poet named Omari Barksdale, took me to introduce me to Alia. I met her (at a violence prevention conference) on Mack and Van Dyke. At the time, I had a $1,600 car and some people broke into my car. Everybody came out and gave me some money to get my car fixed, and I started volunteering. When I volunteered for a year, I was getting formed as an organizer, and Alia offered me a job.
I came on and I continued to get training, and the more effort I put in, the more I learned, the more impact we had together.
She created more space on the platforms to be able to exemplify what the work looked like. So I knew shortly after meeting her that it was meant to be.
BD: Alia, when did you know Dujuan would be an important piece of FORCE Detroit’s future?
Harvey Quinn: There were a few moments … I got to see how empathetic he is and how much he cared about the issues.
There were two big moments, though. In 2021, he landed the big sort of partnership for the organization, and then, he pulled out like 50 people to a community meeting and this meeting represented many of the people at the center of violence from the Cody Rouge Neighborhood, and, at the time, it was in partnership with D-Live (an intentional, health-centered solution to community violence in Detroit). I was like, ‘Oh, we’ve got what we need in the room to actually get the work started without the bells and whistles that the public funding will give us, but we’re going to start here, and we will use this to advocate.’
BD: As you look forward to life after FORCE Detroit, what is next for you?
Harvey Quinn: I’ve got a fellowship that will allow me some self investment and personal cultivation time. And I’m gonna spend time making sure that my children are all doing well.
So, I’m gonna be a hovering mother, and professionally, I’m not sure what comes next.
But I’m interested in figuring out solutions to sustainability. A lot of the work that we’ve done fairly successfully is answering the sustainability question for the field of community-led safety nonprofits that we wanted to see in our city, and we’ve been able to locate federal, state and local resources, for the most part, for more than just our organization. I’d love to head in that direction and try to solve problems at that level.
BD: Lastly, Dujuan, now that you’re getting ready to take the leading role in the organization, what are some things you’re looking forward to in 2025 and beyond?
DK: It’s sustainability and being able to make sure that the progress that has been made continues and has further reach through partnerships and collaborations. Designing an ecosystem that’s functional, that’s a macro ecosystem, which will be citywide, in a micro ecosystem, which would be neighborhood-based or community-based, and just expanding the work, and for that work to be professionalized to the degree of something that’s permanent.
That’s what we set out to do. That’s what we’re going to do, so, to fulfill the vision that FORCE Detroit was founded on, which is a free or safe for Detroit is what I’m looking forward to.
You can learn more about FORCE Detroit here.