The Texas After Violence Project is a public memory archive that fosters deeper understandings of the impacts of state-sponsored violence by building power with directly impacted communities and centering their dignity, agency, and expertise to cultivate restorative and transformative justice. In 2018, TAVP received a grant from the Progressive Multiplier Fund to research, develop, launch, and market-accredited online training as a new revenue generation strategy. Since that launch, requests for TAVP staff to speak at conferences and facilitate training and workshops have increased exponentially.
With an additional grant from Progressive Multiplier, TAVP is working to build on the successes of its previous project by developing a consulting model with the dual function of expanding its mission and generating revenue to aid long-term sustainability. They conducted research on the type and impact of requests received and studied consulting models in use by other groups to build their own.
Currently, TAVP has defined its offerings and set a preliminary fee. They have secured four contracts and are hiring permanent staff to run the program. The project will ultimately include a communications and marketing strategy and generate a report on findings for other nonprofits interested in duplicating their efforts.Through this experiment, TAVP looks to direct more resources toward mission innovation and expand its autonomy by investing in actions that may be difficult to fund through a government or foundation grant. This includes paid positions and fellowships for incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, and people without documented status.
Texas After Violence is dedicated to the telling, preserving, and sharing personal experiences of people harmed by the criminal legal system while always honoring the agency, dignity, and narrative power of every directly impacted person. This work takes many forms, although the archive's core is video-based oral history interviews.