Applications for this position are currently closed.
Are you a formerly incarcerated person who would like to use your personal experience to transform the legal system? If you have direct experience with incarceration – whether it’s jail, prison, probation, or immigrant detention – and an interest in using the knowledge you’ve gained from that experience, Texas After Violence encourages you to apply for our newly created Community Advisor contract position.
The Community Advisor will use their expertise as a person directly harmed by state-sponsored violence to help shape Texas After Violence’s day-to-day work and vision. Specifically they will attend TAVP’s weekly team meetings, offer both practical and philosophical insight about TAVP projects and programs, and suggest areas/issues where TAVP can expand its advocacy.
The Community Advisor must live in Texas and have a general familiarity with the Texas criminal legal system. While there is no formal educational requirement for this position, the community advisor must have direct lived experience of state-sponsored violence, including having been arrested, incarcerated or detained, having been evicted and/or experiencing significant housing instability, and/or having been harmed by police violence.
The term for the Community Advisor is six months (October 2021-March 2022). The Community Advisor will be compensated $30/hour for up to five hours per week.
If you would like to be considered for this position, please send us an email at staff@texasafterviolence.org telling us about yourself (suggested length 300-1000 words). Applications are due by September 24th. Although you are not required to answer any of the following prompts in your email, we’ve provided them as suggestions.
- Have you been in jail or prison, detained by immigration, evicted from your home or otherwise been harmed by law enforcement?
- How have those experiences affected your ideas of the meaning of justice?
- What are criminal-justice related issues that you’d like to see get more attention/awareness?
- Texas After Violence is a community-based archive that documents the effects of state-sponsored violence. What is your understanding of the work we do, and what excites you about the prospect of being a part of it?
- How can telling stories about personal experiences help change the public’s idea of what justice means?
- What roles do you think racism and America’s history of slavery play in shaping Texas’s criminal legal system?
- What are some ways that nonprofits and other organizations that work to reform the criminal legal system could make it easier for people who have experience with the system to get involved?
