With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Texas After Violence Project (TAVP) welcomes applications for our 2025 Visions After Violence Community Fellowship, an opportunity for people who are directly impacted by state violence to advance TAVP’s community-based documentation and archival work mission to cultivate deeper understandings of the impacts of state violence on individuals, families, and communities.
At the root of our work and mission is our guiding belief that people whose lives have been directly impacted by state violence (including but not limited to police violence, mass incarceration, in-custody abuse and death, immigration enforcement, and the death penalty) not only should have a “seat at the table” but must be key decision-makers at every stage of our work, from project planning to implementation to public activation of our archival materials. Our Visions After Violence Community Fellowship Program continues our commitment to centering the experiences, perspectives, and visions of people directly impacted by state violence.
There are no formal educational requirements. The most important qualifications for Visions After Violence Fellows are direct lived experience and deep interest in oral history interviewing, community memory work, abolition, and transformative justice. Fellows are required to live in the United States. We especially welcome applications from BIPOC communities that have been directly targeted by white supremacist patriarchal violence past and present. We know that undoing these legacies of violence requires recentering those most harmed by it.
One Community Fellow will be selected for the 2025 Visions After Violence Community Fellowship, beginning March 2025 and ending in December 2025. This Community Fellow will receive a $10,000 stipend and an additional $1,000 stipend for materials and supplies.
The Community Fellow must attend a virtual workshop with the TAVP team scheduled in Spring 2025 and dedicate at least 5-10 hours per week during the fellowship term. This fellow will work closely with the TAVP team, Community Advisory Council, TAVP’s Writer and Artist in Residence, and other collaborators to design and carry out a community-based oral history and archival project related to TAVP’s core issue areas:
- Inclusive, ethical, and responsible memory work in the aftermath of violence
- Prison abolition
- Disrupting multi-generational cycles of trauma reenforced by state violence
- Reimagining public safety
- Reparative and transformative justice
- Breaking down barriers to mental health treatment for directly impacted people
- Understanding the impacts of state violence through a public health lens
- Developing alternative models to addressing violence without perpetrating more violence and trauma
- Building community archives as sites of activism, advocacy, and liberation
The Community Fellow will conduct between 5 to 10 oral history interviews over the course of their VAV Community Fellowship. After the interviews have been processed, reviewed, and submitted to TAVP’s public archive, the After Violence Archive, the Community Fellow will collaborate with the TAVP team to share the stories and other project materials to a broader audience. This could mean creating zines, an interactive interview exhibit, a short film, or any creative project/activity that brings the interviews to new audiences.
Please find the application form here or embedded below.
If you have any questions about the Visions After Violence Community Fellowship, please contact us at staff@texasafterviolence.org.
Application & Fellowship Timeline
Applications Open: November 1, 2024
Applications Due: December 4th, 2024
Application Updates: December 13th, 2024
Community Fellows Selected: January 31st, 2025
Fellows Virtual Workshop: February 2025
Fellowships Begin: March 1st, 2025
Fellowship Ends: December 15th, 2025