The power of community organizing is real!

After years of targeted organizing work, some of Live Free’s key partner organizations are making great strides reducing violence in their cities. In both Detroit and Orlando, it was the organizers themselves who built their own community-led violence intervention (CVI) programs.

Detroit has long maintained some of the highest homicide rates in the country, despite the city’s Ceasefire program. For years, leaders from Force Detroit and their Live Free Coalition tried to get the city to revamp this program which the National Institute of Justice has rated as having “no effect” on reducing violence. Finally, in 2023, the coalition successfully pushed the city to make a two-year $10 million investment in CVI and Force Detroit was given ownership over one of the neighborhoods in order to implement its own program. After just the first quarter of implementation, the City of Detroit reported that Force Detroit’s target neighborhood had a 72% reduction in fatal and nonfatal shootings in comparison to the same quarter the previous year (far outpacing reductions in any other part of the city). Force Detroit and the Live Free Coalition continue to push the city to make a $150 million investment in CVI over the next ten years.

Florida Rights Restoration Coalition

After years of advocacy, the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC) and Live Free USA finally got the City of Orlando to make an initial two-year $3 million investment in CVI. With these funds, FRRC, a statewide advocacy organization that led the campaign to restore voting rights to 1.4 million Floridians with felony convictions, started their own street intervention program. With technical assistance from Live Free and Advance Peace, the Peace Orlando program was launched in 2022. After the first full year of implementation, the city had a 20% reduction in gun homicides and a 36% reduction in injury shootings; and halfway through its second year, shootings continue to drop. FRRC and Live Free continue to push county officials to expand the program past the city limits in order to impact the whole region.