“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” ~MLK

The ways in which we acquire, invest, and use our resources is a question of great moral significance. Any budget is a moral statement of priorities, whether it's a budget created by an individual, a family, a school, a city, or a nation. It tells us, mathematically, what areas, issues, things, or people are most important to the creators of that budget, and which are least important.

MoralDocs is a collaborative artwork, a product of an arts facilitation process to hold collective visioning spaces for anti-racist resourcing, participatory budgeting, and investing in community well-being.

This research-based, interactive artwork is a container for: 

• stories and case studies based on community lived-experience with emergency management response in the city

• assessing and contextualizing research and data on the Public Safety Dept in Providence and how it impacts our communities

• presenting the historic and modern harms associated with the complications of public safety and behavioral health

• presenting a vision for community-designed public safety strategies that can make a case for increasing investment into anti-racist institutions with meaningful community ownership

Background:

In 2020, Vatic Kuumba and Shey Rivera Ríos facilitated, planned and supported community and City Council members with public discussions about Public Safety and how it relates to the City budget. Starting off from data compiled by Providence Youth Student Movement (PrYSM) and other community partners, Kuumba and Rivera collaborated with community to design and facilitate six (6) public forums with 300+ participants. The process involved designing an abolitionist toolkit with content that could be replicated by other facilitators, including the history of policing, a walkthrough of the ‘divest-invest’ model, and a facilitated survey as an exercise of imagining what it could mean to invest into community resources by reallocating funds from the City budget. After this process, Kuumba and Rivera were invited by the City of Providence to lead a second phase of the work, to turn the community visioning processes and the stories shared by residents into a collection of artworks woven into a futurist vision for an anti-racist future where community well-being is prioritized and policing has been abolished. 

The writing of the script and production of the MoralDocs virtual reality film began in Oct 2020 And for the 10 months after that, we worked tirelessly alongside a team of 20+ artists, residents, community organizers, and the City of Providence, to present a project that proposes a future of liberation and community resourcing. This is MoralDocs.