An Interview with Gabriel Solís, After Violence Project [Systems Leadership Series #01]

Please introduce yourself: who are you and what do you do?

My name is Gabriel Solís and I am approaching my 10th year as Executive Director of the After Violence Project [we used to be the Texas After Violence Project]. I got my start as an intern here when I was in college and returned in 2016 as Executive Director. I’ve written and spoken about my experience in those early years of sitting in people’s homes and absorbing stories about their experience with state violence. Hearing about having a loved one who has perpetuated serious violence, the trial, the many years of evidentiary hearings, followed by the execution, and the social stigma that accompanies all of it. It was very eye-opening for me as a young person, and I really came to value documentation and preservation of these stories, which I see as forms of endangered knowledge, quickly disappearing for many reasons. There’s a serious urgency for community-based documentation and preservation.

Can you name and say a little about some of the systems that the After Violence Project is engaged with and trying to change?

I see it as a set of concentric circles. 

The first circle is to directly help people in our communities in the aftermath of state violence, where there are few resources in the aftermath of state violence. If you’re the survivor of a murder victim, there are resources available to you, though they’re often tied to expectations that you’ll participate in prosecutions, for example. But there are few resources if you’ve been a victim of police brutality or if you’re coming out of incarceration or if your loved one dies in custody of the state. In that first concentric circle, we really try to change that dynamic by doing things like providing skills and training opportunities, setting up a staff-controlled mutual aid fund, and training mental health practitioners to be better prepared to work with people who are directly impacted by state violence. 

The second concentric circle is to dismantle the carceral state and the prison-industrial complex. This is an extremely brutal and short-sighted system that doesn’t really do anything to help anybody. It only perpetrates more harm, violence, and trauma.  We don’t have to get into why we’re here, but as a society we are here. We respond in a very retributive way to harm and violence. It is deeply entrenched in our culture. So the second concentric circle is working to close jails, detention centers, and prisons. 

The third concentric circle is what some would call narrative or culture change. Yes, we want to close jails and prisons and prevent the building of new ones, but we also know that our work must operate on broader and deeper narrative and cultural levels to really get people to think differently about how we respond to violence and harm, and help people rebuild and deal with grief and loss in the aftermath of violence that doesn’t involve oppressing people or putting people in cages.

What’s the role of archival work in all of this? How does AVP’s archival work feed your systems work?

In the early days, archiving was at the end of the spectrum of work, now its near the beginning. Around 2017 we shifted the dynamic, realizing that people with shared lived experience should be the ones doing much of this work. We started partnering with other community-based advocacy organizations and collaborating with people who had experienced loss around the death penalty and police shootings, and with people coming out of incarceration, by providing resources and tools to do this work in their own communities for their own advocacy purposes.

Most of the people we work with are survivors of violence. They are activists, organizers, and creatives. We have fellowship programs for directly impacted people. It’s them telling us “This is what I’m living every day, and this is where we need to do this work.” We’re providing them with tools, resources, and funding, which has resulted in important archival collections. 

We’re wrapping up a strategic planning process now, and one of the findings was that we urgently need to increase our technical capacity for our digital repository for more community collections. 

We also determined that we don’t want to be on the sidelines supporting coalitions—we want to be part of coalitions. So we launched an advocacy pillar and created our first advocacy-focused position. In all of these ways, we’re connecting our documentation and archival work with our direct advocacy work for abolition and transformative justice. 

Can you talk a bit about where and how the systems-level change you’re working toward is connected to the way you do the day-to-day work in your organization? 

Being serious about collaborative decision-making and shared leadership, navigating uncomfortable conversations around accountability, holding true to our restorative and transformative justice values, and recognizing the toll of this work on our bodies and minds, as well as on our loved ones, is core to our work. 

Everything that we deal with at AVP is around violence in some form. We’re hearing and  seeing horrible things in both historical collections and collections from people who are currently incarcerated or the loved ones of those who have been killed by the state. So I’ve been focused on providing the team opportunities to step away and rest. 

Little things that aren’t groundbreaking but go a long way: we have monthly wellness Fridays, a two week summer break every June (where we just pause to rest and recharge), a three week winter break, and a new benefit of up to $2,000 to cover uncovered health and wellness related expenses. 

We call it restorative operations. 

It’s allowed us to keep a really good team together and to recruit really great people who want to be a part of this organization. We can’t pay the highest salaries, but we try to make up for that with our approach to how we work—through these kinds of benefits and by centering care.

We have a staff-controlled mutual aid fund that emerged from our desire to be responsive to people in our communities who need resources quickly. 

We also have a budget line for staff wellness. If someone on the team is having a bad day, we’ll have lunch delivered to them. If someone loses a loved one, we’re sending flowers. Little things like that go a long way in recognizing that we’re doing this work together, we need to take care of each other. 

We take a lot of pride in the fact that we like to do things our own way, and really try to carve out our own space within the nonprofit industrial complex, which makes it really hard for organizations like ours to succeed. We’re really trying hard to succeed anyway.

What about in terms of coalitions, collaborators, community participants, or other organizations that you’re in partnership with? How do you use systems leadership strategies to support trust building and action among stakeholders that have a common agenda? How do you all, as the AVP, approach systems leadership work in that context?

We have a really great pipeline of people who get involved with our work and stay involved, often for many years, in different capacities. One of our former Visions After Violence community fellows is now on our board of directors. One of our former community advisors (who was also our advocacy fellow) is now on our staff. We don’t want transactional relationships with people in our communities. We ask: how do you want to stay involved with our work? 

We always give people some opportunity to stay involved with our work, because they’ve shown interest in our work and our mission. We’ve built this really nice web of allies and collaborators as a result.  

Do you all have any strategies that you use to assess the effectiveness of the work that you’re doing on the systems that you’re trying to change?

So far in this interview we’ve focused on our many successes at AVP, but there are areas where we haven’t done enough, and impact-tracking is one of them. We need to get better at tracking how people are engaging with and using our archival collections. We’ve relied on word of mouth, or occasionally a researcher or writer will reach out and say, ‘Hey, just wanted you to know I used your archives for my book.’

We are also tracking requests for help that come in. People want to do this work ethically and effectively and they reach out to us for guidance. We receive these requests almost weekly. Frankly, this was what led to our relaunch as AVP and embracing what we call a ‘borderless mission’ that will allow us to be more responsive to the demand for our work and expertise. I hope it also means securing more funding so that we can be more responsive to the urgent need to do this work in every community, in the US and globally.

Does the term ‘systems leadership’ describe the kind of work that AVP is trying to do? Does it offer a useful frame?

I’d never heard of ‘systems leadership’ but once I read your email, I thought “Oh, this is what we’re doing.” AVP has always been a little bit different, because we’ve always talked about changing cultures and building communities where harm and violence are met with listening and accountability rather than more harm and violence. We’ve been using that language since the organization was founded nearly twenty years ago.

We often say that you can’t have an organization working to build communities where connections that have been ripped apart by state violence are mended through listening and accountability—and then have a toxic organization that can’t keep people happy or where everybody hates each other. Those things are inconsistent.

So how we do our work really matters. 

What advice would you give to emerging leaders who want to drive systems change in their own fields? Folks who are doing or want to do, say, community archives work or archival work connected to systems leadership?

The advice I would offer is sometimes you have to throw out the rules. Focus on the people and communities you’re trying to serve and work alongside. Listen to what they say your work should look like and how you approach operations, documentation, preservation, and activation.

First and foremost, listen and understand the unique role you have to play in this work. Recognize that sometimes your role is more about being a coordinator, facilitator, and resource mobilizer. 

Right now, my role—without wanting to sound too dramatic—is to ensure that AVP can continue to exist. My role is to understand the specific risks and threats our organization, our staff, and the people we work with in our communities are facing in the current political climate, and doing everything I can to sustain our work and keep people safe. I believe in this organization and I believe in our mission and I’ll always show up every day and do my best even though it’s really hard.