The Shift: Voices of Prevention — A podcast by Prevent Child Abuse America

Love as a Force for Justice

• Prevent Child Abuse America

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In this episode of The Shift: Voices of Prevention, Desmond Meade, Executive Director of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, shares his extraordinary journey from homelessness and addiction to leading one of the most significant civil rights victories of our time—restoring voting rights to more than 1.4 million returning citizens.

With honesty and hope, Desmond challenges us to rethink how we approach justice, belonging, and human dignity. His message is clear: lasting change doesn’t come from fear or division, but from compassion and love.

“We didn’t have to tear each other down to be successful. We didn’t have to instill fear in each other to be successful. We could actually move major human rights issues through love.” — Desmond Meade

Tune in for a powerful conversation about resilience, redemption, and how shifting the narrative around returning citizens can help build a more inclusive society where everyone belongs and families thrive.

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SPEAKER_01:

This is the Shift Voices of Prevention, a podcast from Prevent Child Abuse America, where we explore bold ideas, cultural change, and what it truly means to support children and families. Join us to change the narrative one conversation at a time. Hello and welcome to PCA America's 2025 National Conference. I'm Nathan Fink, and I'm Luke Waldo. And this is the Shift Voices of Prevention. We're recording live from Portland, Oregon, where we're thrilled to be joined by Keynote Desmond Mead, a 2021 MacArthur Fellow award-winning voting rights activist and executive director of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition. Desmond's work to restore voting rights to over 1.4 million Floridians has earned him recognition in publications like the New York Times, Fast Company, and Times magazine, where he was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world. And your work not only restored rights, but it restored hope. Desmond, welcome to the show. Hey. How are you guys doing?

SPEAKER_02:

It's great to see you. So I I want to start as I was mentioning earlier, at the end where you finished the keynote speech and the conversation with Dr. Merrick. You talked about your optimism and that that exudes from your being, right? It was clear on the stage today that hope and compassion is Desmond Mead. I want to understand, though, that that optimism where it comes from and how it led to the success of the movement that Nathan has just shared in restoring voting rights for 1.4 million formerly incarcerated Floridians, right? Because we we live in a moment, certainly, um, where there are these deeply held societal beliefs, oftentimes very negative belief systems around people who have been incarcerated, right? So how did you and your optimism break through some of those mental models to bring in people that maybe previously didn't see people who had been incarcerated as being worthy of having their voting rights restored?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, and you know, I first of all I think that when you talk about hope, I think, you know, some people just like brush by that word. But hope is actually one of the most powerful things that you can actually talk about. I mean, I I don't even know if you can actually contain hope, right? You can't you can't hold it down. It it's just that powerful. And knowing that if you don't have hope, then I mean, what's the use of even like living? And so I think one of the things is, you know, desperation. Out of desperation, maybe we do cling to hope um a little bit. I know I do, you know. Um, and then of course I always get examples of that. You know, you some sometimes you're having a bad day and maybe somebody just you pass someone and they smile. Just a smile or a nod, or they say hello. And it's it's even more powerful when it's someone of a of a different race, right? Or someone that you're not necessarily used to. But they do some they do some type of kind gesture and it kind of reignite, you know, this feeling that man, that I think at the depths of our nature is a desire to connect, you know, uh uh a desire to be in community, you know. It's some I mean, you see us living in communities now, you know, and and it's natural. And I think the the the fight is how do we keep the unnatural from dominating the natural? How we you know what I'm saying? How do we keep the the the fiction from just totally like annihilating or silencing real what reality is really all about? And I think um that's something that we have to hold on to out of desperation, and then understanding that if we hold on to it, that we are holding on to the most powerful force out there. You know, I think Obama wrote a book talking about the audacity of hope, right? And uh and I I do believe that without hope, we're we're we're like we're gonna perish. We might as well just lay down and die, and I'm not ready to die. I think life is beautiful.

SPEAKER_02:

You you talk about, right, hope being kept alive, right? By really confronting, as I think you mentioned earlier, this false narrative, right? Or you you just talked about this unnatural kind of sense of who we are, right? How how did that narrative shift not only help you, but help the coalition that you built push through?

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Powell So let me tell you, so it was just really some simple things. And I and actually, there are some things that happened as a child that actually have shaped who I am today, right? And I and I talk about it in my book. One being that uh I remember Amy, right? Uh little white girl that I grew up in the islands with, right? And Amy and I were like inseparable, right? And I had no clue, like she was white and I'm black, and we're not supposed to, I had no clue whatsoever. And I talk about how we we cling to each other out of pure desperation when our parents were going separate ways. And she was going back to the mainland. I was still in the Virgin Islands, and we didn't want to be separated. And the parents pried us apart and took us on our separate ways, and then we would shake loose from the parent and run back to each other and cling to each other, screaming at the top of our lungs, right? And this thing about that and and even experiences I've had living in in the Midwest, right, that that helped me see that the world is much more complex than what people may try to make it, right? And that things that they say are reality is not necessarily reality, that that we we spend so much time trying to define our enemies that we lose sight of who are friends, and we spend so much time trying to highlight the differences that we have totally lost sight of the fact that we have more in common than what separates us as human beings, right? And so all of those things like right come together. And when I started this campaign uh to restore voting rights to folks in Florida, uh I told my partner very simple. Neil Voges, he was a a conservative guy. He's used to, he's a political operative, you know, he's he's done a lot of work in DC. Um and he was like asking me about, man, we got to get this enemy. We got to get like who are we fighting against? We every campaign needs an enemy. And I told him, no, we don't. I said the key is now how do we get people to look at us as human beings first? And once they can do that, once that we can connect along the lines of humanity, we're good. We're going to win. And I'm telling you, every expert was like, what the hell is this guy smoking? Like, like, for real, I had to be on something, but it was just something deep inside that told me that blood was thicker than water, and if we can bring uh if we can create a connectivity, a human connectivity between people, then it doesn't not, it we could elevate this campaign above partisan politics, above even implicit or explicit racial biases, right? And we were actually able to do that. You know, um, you know, I sometimes I I get a little upset because I think we, we, we, we found uh, I don't know if you guys ever look at Mr. Impossible.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00:

So the last one, right, where they talk about the poison pill, right? That I think we have the poison pill, but no one asks about the poison pill. But we have the poison pill to defeat this mechanism that's trying to take over the world. And and what what is it doing? It's actually taking reality and and hiding it and creating a false narrative and having controlling the world through a false narrative, right? And I think we're experiencing that right now, but I think we do have that poison pill, and that poison pill, I believe, is this connectivity that we have. And if we can just get in the proximity of folks and and push people that way, I think we can defeat these evil forces. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

I remember where I was when I read that part with Amy. Because it affected me that much because there's something about us as humans that that still lives inside of us, right? Because there's a lot of unlearning, unschooling we have to do to approach what you're suggesting, right? Yeah. And part of that, though, is around these mental models that I think Luke was talking about, and even reframing things. That you reframed in formally incarcerated to returning citizens, that is something, that's a brilliant shift because what it does is it allows us to hold it differently, right?

SPEAKER_00:

You see the humanity in the person now, and then they're not some inanimate object that you can despise and have no connection to, no emotions uh can not emotionally connected, or even have any empathy, right? And I talked about it in the talk today about how the United States, before they bombed Hiroshima Nagasaki, they engaged in this narrative campaign that desensitized people as to the humanities of Japanese and actually dehumanized them, right? And and and and in doing so, when they did drop the bomb and killed all these kids and women, they were celebrating in the streets. Think about it, celebrating in the streets. That's the power of the narrative. We see that happening with the uh with the conflict in in Israel, in Gaza. A narrative actually controls how we react to atrocities, right? And that word, you know, like there was uh experts, they they studied that word, and they say when you call somebody a felon or you call somebody uh a convict, you actually increase the likelihood of them recidivating or committing more offenses. You've heard it. You call a child grow stupid growing up, what's that child going to grow up believing that they are? Stupid. The power of the words, right? And so that's why we like, no, we can't call people the F-word or whatever. We need to give something that's brings more, uh humanize them more, right? And we came up with, no, you're a citizen of a community of a state that's returning back into the community. And that's how we came up with returning citizen. Uh folks use of people uh led describers, you know, people who were formerly incarcerated, people who were convicted of felon, but we led with people, right? Uh and I think that is that is so vital, right? Even uh when folks used to say, oh, Desmond, that was a great bipartisan campaign you read. I was like, no, we're well in the bipartisan campaign. And they were like, okay, I get it, Devon. You was a nonpartisan campaign, right? And I was like, no, we weren't that either. What we were was a grassroots, organic grassroots movement that welcomed and enjoyed bipartisan support. And the difference was we didn't leave with the politics, we led with people. And when you lead with people first, in so many ways, it's a totally, entirely different approach. And how people are able to connect and how many people you're actually able to bring under that umbrella. You leave with the party, you lead with the the labels that divide us, is this is a progressive movement, this is a conservative movement, this is uh this movement, or that movement. Then what you do is that you limit who you can talk to or who can come talk to you. No, man, this is a people senate thing. This is this is about humanity, and it allows people from all walks of life and all political persuasions to actually be a part of that. Which means now I have to find a way to deal with my biases that I may have against white men, white women, or black men or black women or conservatives or progressives. I have to overcome that. And the best way for me to overcome that is to just grab on or hold on to the fact that we all have a shared humanity. And let that be like the through line through everything.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Now, if we when we talk about this, it strikes me that in hearing about a movement or your journey, for a listener, it can feel linear. This then this then this. But it's nonlinear, right? It's all over the place. It's it is, right? So I wanted to dig into that because when you look back at different moments or even different leverage points where there's this aha or this way to get around an obstacle, are there any things that you would point out and say, no, this one actually changed me this way?

SPEAKER_00:

You know, one thing is is believe it or not, um the politics is like so you know, I put it like this. I I do believe, right? I do believe that there are way more good people than there are bad people. Right. But I think the reason that bad wins is because sometimes folks can't get out of their own way. And you have one side trying to point to the other side as the reason for our ills, and you you actually have a vice versa, and the whole time neither side is doing what they're supposed to do, right? And that was like a real like moment for me. Um when I, you know, and I and I see it, you know, even around like, say, criminal justice reform, believe it or not, when we we dug a little deeper and and we got into some research and we went into some rooms that we weren't supposed to go in, because that's another thing, too, is that people would tell you, don't deal with that guy across the street because he's a bad person. And sometimes it's not because that person is a bad person, it's because that person knows that if you get to deal with this guy across the street, he might shed some light on how d you're not doing everything that you're supposed to be doing, right? And so as long as I can keep you aw away from having a conversation with your neighbor, you know, I'm thinking that you're the best person in the world and not knowing that you've been actually shortchanged with me all this time.

unknown:

Right.

SPEAKER_00:

Right? Um, and and so that's a way to avoid responsibility. That was very important for me because it and and it helped me because I didn't I didn't realize, like, you know, at the end of the day, I I didn't have any experience on running a state campaign. Listen, I ran a statewide campaign in the most difficult state to actually pass a constitutional amendment during a most difficult political time, divisive time, and in a state that is tripolar. Not bipolar, but tripolar. It'll just give you, like, you have segments in one year it gives you Barack Obama, the next year it gives you Donald Trump. Like there's it's really like all over the place. And I was still able to garner over 60% a supermajority, because most other places, you just need a simple majority. I had to get a supermajority. And I was able to do that. I'm giving you a good example. In the very same state, Florida, you had two uh two initiatives uh last cycle. One was around abortion, and the other one was around recreational marijuana, right? And in the recreational marijuana, they spent over a hundred, and I think fifty million dollars to get it passed. You with me? Recreation marijuana was even endorsed by President Donald Trump, right? And even with spending$150 million, it failed horribly. Recreation marijuana. I had an issue that was politic a political powder cake that threatened to shift the political balance of one of the most important states because prior to 2020, um you had to go way back to find a time when somebody got into the White House without winning the state of Florida. State of Florida was crucial. And so when you talk about adding 1.4 million people to the voting roster in Florida, that is a political powder keg, right? For marijuana, about 100 million was spent against Recreation Marijuana. 100 million was spent, 150 million was spent to to pass it with the endorsement of Donald Trump, and 100 million was spent against it, right? You know how much was spent against my campaign to add 1.4 million new voters to the roster in a swing state like Florida. I mean, it's historically high. I can't hundreds of millions? Not one penny. You know how much money I spent on a campaign?$23 million.$23 million, no opposition dollars, compared to$150 million and$100 million, and they failed I passed. Why? Because it's actually understanding the the the fallacies of a lot of these systems and and really go being willing or bold enough to go beyond where these systems tell you you should only go. Right? No, I had over a million Republicans vote for this amendment. Listen, I had, and and one of the telling things about this amendment was right before, a month before election, we did one final focus group, and we brought in super Trump supporters and we gave them two stories. We said if you vote yes on Amendment 4, it will be a death blow to Donald Trump and these god, these dastardly conservative folks is gonna take over our great state, and we don't want that. The other one was if you vote, and I think this is 2018, if you vote for Amendment 4, MS 13 is gonna invade Florida and kill our women and children. Right? That's what we told them. And then when we polled them again, we still had a super majority support for Amendment 4. Yes, we have the poison pill. We have the poison pill. And part of that process is going beyond where they tell you to go. And understanding that the people who they're telling you are your enemies are not your enemy. Just because someone thinks different than you don't make them your enemy. If that's the case, you'd be fighting your wife or your significant other every single day. But we show in our own homes that we don't have to agree with everything with each other in order to love each other and care about each other in a very loving way and in a humane way, right? We see that. We see the homes. Half the home is uh Crimson Tide, Alabama, the other half is Auburn. One is uh Michigan, the other one is Ohio State. We see that all the time, right? We've we've seen uh power couples with one with a Republican, the other with a Democrat. We've seen that. We've seen, I mean, one of the most beautiful moments in politics was when McCain and and uh uh President Obama were debating, and and this one person asked this question about Obama, and McCain stepped in and said, wait a minute, we may not agree with everything, but I respect this man, and you know, that was like beautiful. And so, but nowadays they're saying that if you're a Democrat or Republican, we have to hate each other, and we have to, you're automatically racist, or you're automatically this, and that anything, if you agree with something, then that means that something's not right and you a sellout. We're in this type of environment that is not conducive to us being able to thrive as a nation or as a community. I was able to crack through that, and because of that, I was able to talk to people who they told me I wasn't supposed to talk to. Right? And that's you know, uh the bigger fault lies on the progressive side because they actually really bought into that big time about not talking to certain people. And, you know, I used to tell folks that, you know, I know I'm right, but this is for me is so important. Like I tell folks that one of the scariest things for me to do, right, was to talk to my kids about sex. Right? Like, I have four boys and I have one girl, right? And I don't care if it's a boy or girl. I'm like, I was terrified. Like my wife was like, honey, when are we gonna have the talk? I'm like, what talk? You know, the birds and the I'm like, no, not me or whatever. You know, I was like resisting it, but then one night when I was laying down, I thought about it. I was like, if I don't talk to my kids about sex, they're gonna learn it from the internet. A stranger would teach them. And I had to ask myself, who would I want to teach my son or daughter about sex, me or a stranger. And so as a society, there's some folks that we, instead of us talking to them, we actually just bury our head in the sand and turn the other way. Well, guess what? Donald Trump came and talked to the very same people, and now we're mad that what? No. Because we didn't talk to them, somebody else came and talked to them about society and the ills or whatever. We can't get mad at Trump. We get we gotta get mad at ourselves because we didn't be we weren't bold enough to go beyond people we were comfortable with and have real conversations.

SPEAKER_02:

So I want to w work from that. And I and I actually think the the example you used about your your kids is is a powerful one as well, right, within the home. It's like what what what you what you've done in your community really translates to how do you have those conversations to prevent harm coming to your children, right? Um in the first place. And so a lot of the work that you've done to this point is really about undoing harm, right? That harm has already been caused, whether it's because of exclusionary policies, right, or these reactive systems, as you easily pointed out in the the keynote. Um how do how do you take that that poison pill, right, the connectivity, the the relationship building that you have have done in this work and move it further upstream so that we can prevent harm from happening in the first place?

SPEAKER_00:

Prior planning prevents fiscal performance. How do we prevent harm from happening in the first place? You know, so one of the things I talked about was first understanding that that narrative is a blocker to preventive action, right? That because it it it it reduces the level of empathy, right? Or the desire to want to change some things, right? Because of this narrative thing. How I I push it up, I I think is is is slowly just moving people along and having people see, you know, uh a reason to to love someone, I s for lack of a better word. I think that, you know, I and I said it before that, you know, I think the key is if we can get people to love who they what they despise the most or or who they hate the most, then they're capable of loving everyone, right? And so how are we slowly getting people to love what they're scared of, right? Um you know, the guy that commits a crime, right? Everybody's scared of Joe, big Joe criminal, right? But how do we get folks to see the humanity in that little kid that broke their car window in San Francisco or whatever, you know? Uh, and see what that person was going through, what led that young man to actually pick up something and throw it and break the window to steal whatever he had to steal. And then how do we now see our sons or ourselves in that person, right? And then from there now, how would we want to be treated if that was us or our sons? Right? Once we get there, we're good. We're like at a good spot because now we're moving into the policy piece. We're moving into the the uh shifting the narrative and dynamics piece. And I think what's crucial is getting them to understand what the the issue is going on with the individual, and then getting them to see themselves in that, right? Or someone who they love. I'm gonna go back to my campaign. Let me tell you, remember I told you Florida is like tripolar. You have like three different sections of Florida. They're in their own little world, right? And one of the things that you learn is that if you're running a statewide campaign, you have to tailor your messaging towards the read in the region that you're gonna be messaging in, right? Whether you're gonna be messaging in the conservative northern part of Florida or the more progressive southern part of Florida or that bipolar part in central Florida, you know, maybe a mixture of some messages there, right? None of that. And a lot of communication experts were like, they could not believe it. I'm like, no way. I'm like, listen, we polled supermajority in every media, major media market in the state of Florida. And none of our messaging varied. It was the same thing. Right? No matter where I went. You ready for this? This is part, this is just one of the ingredients of the poison pill, right? I can't give you all the ingredients. You gotta buy the book, first of all. And then most of the ingredients is in the book, but then the other part is probably you might have to set up for what they have, these new masterclasses or whatever. But let me tell you the poison pill. You ready? Part of one of the ingredients. Whenever I approach somebody, right? First question I ask Do you know anyone who you love who's ever made a mistake? I don't care what part of the state I'm in. And I used to have this shirt called Let My People Vote, right? It says Let My People Vote on it, right? It's the title of my book. And people like, you know, I have this guy coming, well, who's your people? You know, whatever, you know. You got a cowboy comes up, like, well, what's your people, you know? And you think I say people with felony convictions? No. You know what I say? I say anybody who you love or care about who's ever had a felony conviction. See the difference? You see what I just did, right? Do you know anyone who you love who's ever made a mistake? Right? So what I did there, right? Well, number one, love, right? Number two, it's somebody who you love that you're connected to. And it's not those people, right? It's not about politics, it's not even about the race. It's about somebody who you love. And I that was the initial seed that I planted. That's that seed that's able to weather the attack ads or the negative messaging that we talked about, right? And keep you focused in support of this because at the base of your decision-making process is the image of someone who you love or care about that needs this.

SPEAKER_02:

I know I know we're almost at time. So I want to get some those ingredients were were really powerful. And I and I think it would be powerful again to offer all of the people at this conference this week and anyone else who might be listening who are advocating for families, who are in families' homes each and every day, seeing the struggle and trying to help them overcome. I can imagine that there were setbacks time and time again in building this movement and doing the work that you've done. What advice would you give to these folks who are listening today when it comes to overcoming those setbacks? What what what did you rely on to see the light at the end of the tunnel when things were really, really dark?

SPEAKER_00:

So that's a trick question, right? I'm gonna tell you why. It's a standard question. You know, how do you overcome the setbacks and everything? I'm here to tell you that there wasn't any. The biggest challenges was not setbacks. The biggest challenges were getting people to see what you saw, what we saw. The biggest challenges were to get people to stay the hell out of the way, right? And let the universe really guide the camp. That was the biggest challenge that we faced, to be totally honest with you. Like I said, the whole time we were bracing, preparing for the onslaught. This is gonna be a bloodbath, the attack acts are gonna come, and we were like worried as hell because when you, for every dollar that of uh that is spent to oppose whatever you're doing, you've got to spend two to try to negate the impact of that, right? And we're like, no way we're gonna, you know, and so we're thinking that we're gonna get uh pushback from the courts because the process is you collect petitions, when you get to a certain amount, the courts have to approve it for it to even say, okay, you now you could go in and collect the rest of them, and then you when you collect the rest of them, you gotta get on the ballot, and then it's just so many different areas uh uh opportunities for people to ambush you and I mean all the way up to election night. And so, yeah, we were prepared for all of that stuff, but we never faced that. We never did. The thing the the hardest channel was to get people to believe that we can actually win something by actually letting love be our driving force and not we don't have to fight, fight, fight, push back, yo, push back, fight, fight. And no, it's not about it wasn't about the fight. It was about really allowing the universe to actually work its course. And so the big challenge could be. Is that when you don't see things moving the way you think it should move, how do you keep disciplined enough to stay the course? That, you know what I'm saying? How do we, you know, we may not have like huge testimonials or little bright spots every single day, but man, let me tell you, sometimes when it gets like, uh I talked about there were times I wanted to quit. What the hell? Right? It wasn't because of a setback, it just bec it was because it was such an overwhelming task to accomplish, right? I I let my finite mind, right, just take control and didn't think about the infinite possibilities and the power of the universe, right? And sometimes I'm like, man, what am I doing it for? And it doesn't seem like there's enough people. I would go travel across the state of Florida to a meeting and there's only 10 people there, right? Or sometimes five people, man, uh I didn't have gas to get back home. You know, they would like, for real. How do you hold through when it seems like the rest of the world is putting its importance everywhere else? That's the thing, right? How do you, like, even when we're talking about preventing child abuse, and oh, it's not a it's not a hot button issue, right? And and money's not coming in, and people of foundations or endowments are not supporting this because they're doing something else. How do you hold true to the course? How do you continue to lead with love when you see your family you've been working with just take 10 steps back, right? You don't give up. You love your way through this thing, right? Understanding that the moment we give up hope, the moment we stop loving, that's the moment we've accepted defeat. And we might as well just lay down and die, right? But no, you just have to cling on to love and hope. And uh like they said, um uh the spiritual folks earlier today, that you have to also turn that intention on yourself and make sure that you're not, you know, um overwhelming yourself. Right? The advice I give is that, man, man, you live and enjoy life and know that, man, if you're leading with love, you can never go wrong.

SPEAKER_01:

Desmond, thank you for sharing your story with us and your wisdom with everyone at the 2025 PCA America National Conference. We deeply appreciate it. And for everyone listening, remember Shifting Systems starts with shifting stories and the courage to keep telling it until it takes root. It's been an incredible honor, and thank you again for sharing. And you can invite upstream solutions into your feed by subscribing to the shift voices of prevention today. Join us to create an ecosystem where children and families live purposeful and happy lives with hope for the future.