Interfaith Panel | Global Moment: DEIA

Meeting Topic: Our panelists will discuss how they work with other leaders in the community to foster understanding, shape legislation, and create equitable opportunities across racial, ethnic, and religious communities.

Meet Your Speakers

Alia Harvey-Quinn

she/her/hers

Director

FORCE Detroit

aharveyquinn@faithinaction.org

Alia Harvey-Quinn is the Director for FORCE. Born and raised in Detroit, Harvey-Quinn began working in the nonprofit sector as a volunteer performance poet, visual artist, and instructor. Moving from creating art about community issues to working to positively impact those issues, she dedicated 14 years to the nonprofit field, working and volunteering in many schools, community centers, and churches across Metropolitan Detroit. She is passionate about community organizing, arts education, social justice, and media creation that centers communities as the experts and narrators of their own stories. Harvey-Quinn is proud to count among her successes founding FORCE, a project of the Faith In Action Network uniquely designed to primarily engage returning citizens and millennials in Detroit, and co-founding Detroit Future Youth, a youth-led network of over a dozen justice-based media organizing nonprofits. She was also responsible for the development and management of multiple youth entrepreneurial art programs that engaged youth in community activism and resulted in the production of 15 community murals, two spoken word CDs, and hip-hop CDs highlighting issues of youth identity and social justice, two volumes of poetry, an art gallery, as well as several graphically enhanced products.

Dujuan Zoe Kennedy

he/him/his

Community Organizer

FORCE Detroit

dkennedy@faithinaction.org

Dujuan Zoe Kennedy was born and raised on the westside of Detroit, Michigan, by a working-class family with strong ties in the community. By the age of 11, he strayed from his upbringing and began to engage in a lifestyle of crime, leading to 14 years of incarceration. During those years, Kennedy experienced a gradual change for the better due to the conditions and men around him. They encouraged and reinforced his growth by acknowledging and supporting him on the path of activism and unity. Kennedy was released in May 2019 and by the end of June 2019, he was once again surrounded by a community of people active in the betterment of their own people and humanity as a whole.

Rabbi Asher Lopatin

he/him/his

Jewish Community Relations Council

Detroit Center for Civil Discourse

alopatin@jfmd.org

Rabbi Asher Lopatin is the founding director of the Detroit Center for Civil Discourse, a nonprofit designed to bring diverse people together in enriching dialogue, as well as the founding rabbi of Kehillat Etz Chayim, a new, Modern Orthodox synagogue in metropolitan Detroit. Prior to serving in these roles, he was president of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Rabbinical School in New York and the senior rabbi of Anshe Sholom B’nai Israel Congregation in Chicago. While in Chicago, he and his wife, Rachel, helped found the pluralistic Chicago Jewish Day School, and he co-chaired the Jewish Muslim Community Building Initiative of the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs. A Rhodes Scholar and Truman Fellow with an M. Phil in Medieval Arabic Thought from Oxford University, Rabbi Lopatin also has done doctoral work at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, in Islamic Fundamentalist attitudes towards Jews and Israel. He received ordination from Rav Ahron Soloveichik and Yeshivas Brisk in Chicago, and from Yeshiva University, as a Wexner Graduate Fellow. In 2011, Rabbi Lopatin became a permanent member of The Council on Foreign Relations. In addition to being a nationally sought-after teacher and lecturer, Rabbi Lopatin has written numerous articles and chapters in more than 20 books.

About the Organizations

FORCE Detroit (Faithfully Organizing Resources for Community Empowerment) (Detroit, Michigan) is a group of interfaith, grassroots, and public sector leaders committed to having hard conversations about complex community issues, pushing boundaries, and generating creative justice-oriented solutions in Detroit, Michigan. They leverage media and culturally relevant strategies to connect people least likely to be engaged to civic infrastructures.

The Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC/AJC)’s mission is to represent the metropolitan Detroit Jewish community, Israel, and Jews throughout the world to the general community and to establish collaborative relationships with other ethnic, racial, civic, and religious groups. JCRC/AJC educates and advocates on important issues, seeking consensus with a commitment to Jewish values.

The Detroit Center for Civil Discourse seeks to establish a culture which welcomes, encourages, and nurtures deep civic relationships between a diverse group of people with differing points of view through respectful and friendly shared study and mutually impactful conversation.