The Orlando activist who spearheaded the movement to restore voting rights to formerly incarcerated Floridians is retiring from the civil rights group he founded and led for more than 14 years.
Desmond Meade, 58, will step down Sunday as executive director of the Orlando-based Florida Rights Restoration Coalition. The group’s chief of staff will serve in his place until a search committee selects a permanent successor.
Meade, himself an ex-felon, was among the most prominent voices that led to the successful passage of Amendment 4 in 2018 by Florida voters, which affected more than 1.4 million people in the state. For his efforts the Orlando Sentinel named him 2018’s Central Floridian of the Year.
Sarah Espedido / Orlando Sentinel
Desmond Meade, alongside his daughter Xcellence, registers to vote under Amendment 4 as a returning citizen, Tuesday, January 8, 2018. Meade is retiring as head of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition.
He recalled tearfully embracing an elderly man the night Amendment 4 was passed. The man had been barred from voting because he had been convicted of driving with a suspended license, a minor offense. The man wept upon learning he could vote again.
“He would never ever get to vote again in the state of Florida. He would actually die before he gets to participate in democracy,” he said. “This is the legacy of Amendment 4…how we can actually change policies … in the way that’s that’s centered around love for our neighbors.”
Meade said it was time for the FRRC to have new leadership and for him to spend more time with his family, including his first grandchild, a boy who is about 5 months old. He said his older self wouldn’t have been able to imagine in his “wildest dreams” the impact the coalition has had since he founded in 2011.
“When we started it was very modest … just a handful of us returning citizens,” he said, referring to formerly incarcerated people. “We wanted to be like a light to other returning citizens across the state, let them know that they don’t always have to consider themselves as a liability, but they could see themselves as an asset.”
Since the passage of Amendment 4, Meade has sought to help formerly incarcerated people in places besides the ballot box. One initiative he is especially proud of is Peace Orlando, a community violence intervention program launched by the group in 2022 that is funded by the city of Orlando.
Members, many themselves formerly incarcerated, provide intensive mentoring, conflict mediation, case management, and connections to job training and mental health services to people at the highest risk of being involved in gun violence. The program fits Meade’s philosophy that people closer to pain are closer to the solution.
“If we’re able to remove barriers to employment and allow people who have paid their debt to society to get good paying jobs, to be able to support their family, we actually can help stimulate the economy,” he said.
Stephen M. Dowell / Orlando Sentinel
Desmond Meade reacts after being named Orlando Sentinel Central Floridian of the Year at Sheraton Orlando North on Thursday, March 28, 2019. (Stephen M. Dowell/Orlando Sentinel)
In February, the Orlando Police Department announced Orlando’s 2025 homicide level was the city’s lowest since the agency began tracking that data in 1971. At the same time, a report by a national police chiefs group said Orlando saw the biggest drop in homicides in any major city in the country.
Meade held a news conference at the time where he said Peace Orlando had helped contributed to the statistics. He also touted the program’s success using using Orlando crime data from November 2022 through October 2025.
The group found a 88% reduction in gun homicides over the three years and a 71% reduction in injury-related shootings over the same period. There were only five gun homicides in the program’s third year, which it says is the lowest 12-month total on record, and there were 135 fewer people killed or injured by firearms in the program’s third year than the year before the program’s launch.