After Violence Project

10/07/2026

🫂 New Mental Health Guide in Farsi and English: "Helping Children When a Parent or Other Relative is Sentenced to Death or Executed"

AVP is honored to have been part of the international working group of mental health and trauma professionals that produced this guide, now available for use in any country where children are facing this situation.

Written in accessible language and addressed to caregivers and other helpers, the guide was developed with input from Iranian professionals to ensure the Farsi version is culturally appropriate and responsive to the needs of families in Iran.

Currently available in English and Farsi, with additional languages anticipated in the future.

📘 English: https://bit.ly/4j9sSoT
📗 Farsi: https://bit.ly/47FjZw2

10/05/2026

📚️ : "DNA Archive Critical to Identifying Missing Migrants Has Itself Gone Missing"

For over a decade, the Colibrí Center for Human Rights maintained a DNA database that helped reunite the remains of migrants who died crossing the U.S.-Mexico border with their families. Now the database has vanished. Following the organization's dissolution, forensic practitioners across the Borderlands have lost access to thousands of DNA samples and missing persons reports. Families who trusted the archive with their genetic material have heard nothing. This is a devastating case study in what happens when archives lack the infrastructure, resources, and governance to sustain themselves.

🔗 Read the full article:

A key database of migrant DNA has gone missing, after the organization that started it shut down.

09/15/2026

🗯️ “Nearly everyone became engaged in discussing how the documents assigned to us act as another form of confinement.”

📝 AVP Documentation and Archives Intern Sam Carter shares her reflections from her first writing workshop at the Travis County Correctional Complex alongside Community Archives Manager Raquel Garcia.

From navigating the facility's bureaucratic maze to witnessing erasure poetry come alive in the hands of workshop participants, Sam offers a first person account of what AVP memory work looks like across prison walls.

🔗 Read the full article: https://tinyurl.com/4a5ewtwv

09/14/2026

💻 The risks associated with maintaining a repository of information are daunting for even well-funded institutions. Small organizations with limited resources are presented with the same basic challenges, which are then compounded by the impact of those same limitations.

Join us for Risk and Protection for Community Archives with Michael Kanin, AVP’s very own Associate Director of Advancement and Operations

This course will first open a dialog about the risks faced by participants’ organizations, then work to create a series of virtual workshops informed by participants’ experiences and needs.

📅 Dates: October 22 – November 12, 2026 (4 classes)
⏰ Times: Thursdays, 5:30-7:00 PM CT

This course is hosted by AVP’s Community School, a continuing education program hosted by the After Violence Project.

🔗 Learn more and enroll here: https://tinyurl.com/wh5tc4dh

09/11/2026

💫 Shoutout to AVP’s VAV Fellow Alumni Starr Davis and her latest poetry publication with Hanging Loose press, entitled Affidavit!

"Affidavit captures the passionate intensity of motherhood and custody battles within the constraining shape of bureaucratic legal forms. Presenting us with the horrors of incarceration and the wonders of birth, these poems testify to the power of parental love even amidst the suffocating apparatuses of the courtroom.”

Learn more about her publication: https://www.hangingloosepress.com/book/affidavit/

09/10/2026

💸 Community memory work deserves to be resourced and sustainable. In the current landscape of defunding and uncertainty, that means getting creative with earned revenue.

Join us for Exploring Earned Revenue for Community Archives with Gabriel Solís, AVP’s very own Executive Director.

Based on learnings from AVP’s mission and values aligned earned revenue program, this course introduces participants to earned revenue as a key element in development strategies for financial sustainability.

📅 Dates: October 20, 2026 – November 10, 2026 (4 classes)
⏰ Times: Tuesdays, 2:00-3:30 PM CT

This course is hosted by AVP’s Community School.

🔗 Learn more and enroll: https://tinyurl.com/3b8vakmc

09/09/2026

📕 New Book: Harm and Punishment

We are thrilled to uplift this landmark anthology drawn from AVP organizational partner, the American Prison Writing Archive. Harm and Punishment: Incarcerated Writers on Violence and the US Prison centers essays by incarcerated writers tracing how violence shapes lives before, during, and after incarceration - rooted in historical trauma, systemic inequity, and cycles of deprivation.

A powerful testament to what publications becomes possible when we commit to archiving and preserving incarcerated people's voices.

Learn more:

Haymarket Books: books for changing the world.

09/08/2026

✏️ How does pedagogy inform your work? How can your practice be an extension of your values?

Join us for Pedagogy as Practice with Murphy Anne Carter, AVP’s very own Community Programs Director.

In this collaborative, discussion-based course, students will contemplate: what pedagogy is and how it can support project design, knowledge-sharing and creation, as well as reflection in community work. This class is for questions, ideas, co-creation, learning, and unlearning. Participation – in all of its forms – is expected.

📅 Dates: October 21 – November 11, 2026 (4 classes)
⏰ Times: Wednesdays, 6:00-7:30 PM CT

This course is hosted by AVP’s Community School, a continuing education program hosted by the After Violence Project.

🔗 Learn more: https://tinyurl.com/msnkd9dw

09/07/2026

🗃️ New in the Archive: Interview with Atma Meek

In February, AVP Community Archives Manager Raquel Garcia sat down with Atma Meek, a system-impacted abolitionist, advocate, and father who spent 26 years incarcerated. He speaks on the many phases of accountability - internal and external, personal and collective - and the conditions and resources needed to repair and rebuild one's life after incarceration.

Currently, Meek is a recognized advocate for restorative reentry practices and housing resources and currently works with The Other Ones Foundation.

🔗 Listen to the full interview: https://bit.ly/4xaYDBg

🫂 Content Warning: this interview discusses violence, su***de, and death.

09/04/2026

🍎 Our first course of the season!

Join us for Storytelling through the Archives with Raquel Garcia, AVP’s very own Community Archives Manager.

The four-week class will approach archival studies through the lens of deconstruction, reflection, and reinvention. Students are encouraged to break down concepts and definitions rooted in academia, reflect on such topics to explore new possibilities, opportunities, or challenges posed to ultimately apply archival concepts in creative and inclusive ways.

📅 Dates: October 19 – November 9, 2026 (4 classes)
⏰ Times: Mondays, 6:30-8:00 PM CT

This course is hosted by AVP’s Community School, a continuing education program hosted by the After Violence Project.

🔗Learn more: https://bit.ly/465IUs8