For the TAVP team, 2022 began with a focus on how best to put the insights and lessons of the past fifteen years into action. While much of our work remained virtual, we grew our core team, started our Visions After Violence Community Fellowship program, re-energized collaborations with longtime collaborators such as WITNESS and South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA). We continued working with staff, our Community Council, and our board of directors to revisit and expand TAVP’s mission, vision, and values. We helped lead the Community Archives Collaborative (CAC), fostered new connections with other community-based archives and cultural memory workers across the country and hosted the Community Archives Collaborative Convening in Austin. We hosted public events online, like “BODIES After Violence,” a reading and conversation featuring Caleb and Maggie Luna, and in-person celebrations, like our Visions After Violence Showcase. In 2022, our Access to Treatment Initiative provided five different training series about working in clinical settings with family members of individuals who have been sentenced to death or executed. We added 21 interviews that discuss the experiences of women on the inside, the impacts of incarceration on mental health, and how state violence in the form of deportation seeps into the creativity, talents, dreams, and desires of individuals to the After Violence Archive.
While no single report can accurately capture the totality of what an entire year holds, what you will find in this report is a beautiful attempt, one that builds upon our past 15 years of work and harnesses our dreams for a public memory archive that can help to imagine and create accountability and healing in the aftermath of violence. In the midst of so many moving pieces, activities, and ongoing projects, several throughlines remained: our deep commitment to shifting narratives of violence and harm, our recognition that people’s lived experience with violence and the carceral state makes their perspectives and expertise essential in everything we do, and our ongoing work to build power with directly impacted communities to cultivate transformative justice. As in previous years, we centered the questions that guide us and our work: What does justice really look like for victims and survivors of violence? What are our visions of building community and connection after violence? How can our memory work help lead to collective liberation? We tried to embody these questions every step of the way. We are proud of what we accomplished in 2022 and look forward to all that 2023 holds. Stay tuned, be safe, and stay in touch!
