Can around-the-clock, immersive training in peacemaking methods like de-escalation and restorative justice empower low-income community members to prevent violence? Can community members with disabilities who have survived violence receive training as "peacemakers" that helps them work through their traumas and feelings while managing conflicts peacefully? Can articles, podcasts, and collective discussions about reimagining holistic education advance fresh avenues for liberated, peaceful learning for youth and families? Can a new culture of peace transform the health and wellness of youth, parents, and their families despite ongoing challenges of poverty and inequality?
The work of Wisdom Projects answers YES to these questions. Click here for data and videos about the successful impact of our work. Wisdom Projects is a small nonprofit organization with a big story to tell to the world. That story is this: perpetual ceasefire, ongoing mediation, emancipatory education, and a revolutionary sense of love—even when one feels someone does not deserve it—heals and enlightens communities most in need of safety and equality.
Headquartered in Baltimore City, Maryland, Wisdom Projects (officially, Wisdom Projects, Inc.) is a 15-year-old secular 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization (EIN: 27-1060325) committed to building peace and ending inequality for low-income youth, parents, and families through gender-inclusive, intergenerational, trauma-informed, holistic, and disability-conscious community organizing, community education, and community healing.
Wisdom Projects has two divisions:
Wisdom Projects is the result of the 2019 merger of both divisions into one nonprofit organization.
Wisdom Projects also provides private consultations for businesses and schools emphasizing restorative, just, and inclusive approaches to strategic direction, organizational healing, and workplace conflict resolution. Contact us to discuss our consultative services.
Each year, the Baltimore Wisdom Project's six peacemaking programs empower approximately 215 low-income predominately Black youth, parents, and other family members (all of whom experience disability and have survived violence) to become trained community health workers that we call "Peacemakers" who lead grassroots campaigns to prevent violence in their homes, schools, neighborhoods, and the street. Their campaigns are launched by word-of-mouth or within their social media networks. To view video testimonials that include examples of their campaigning, visit the Impact page of our website. The Peacemakers live in housing projects or subsidized housing in East Baltimore's Jonestown neighborhood. Wisdom Projects staff members embed ourselves daily within this East Baltimore community and help constituents practice the wisdom of trauma-informed and disability-sensitive peacemaking through restorative justice. The Baltimore Wisdom Project's year-round, 5-day-a-week STEM & Healing Arts Peacemaking out-of-school-time program for youth aged 5-18 in partnership with the McKim Center in East Baltimore is a central program within our work. Life science and environmental justice are key in our peace education.
As Darren Walker and david rogers (the latter's name is intentionally spelled lowercase) of the Ford Foundation emphasize in the March 2024 issue of Inside Philanthropy, an immersive, around-the-clock, community-participatory approach to violence prevention (also called a "community-based" method) is the best model to uplift true neighborhood peace and wellness. Yet, apart from organizations like Wisdom Projects, this model is not widely effectuated in the greater Baltimore-Washington, D.C. area or it is not carried out in a detailed, systematic, well-managed, data-driven, and evidence-based manner. Wisdom Projects' pioneering community-participatory approach fills this gap.
Key to our approach is the uplifting and compensating of community members as Community Health Workers (CHWs), which we call Peacemakers. Research from the Bulletin of the World Health Organization, the Journal of Global Health, Shelterforce, and Frontiers in Public Health has found an "emerging consensus that CHWs should be paid," as Madeleine Ballard and her team argue in "Compensation models for community health workers."
Most of Wisdom Projects' program budget and a significant part of our operating budget goes towards monthly stipends for CHWs (or Peacemakers) to compensate their trained peacemaking and community-organizing in the neighborhood. Their leadership has been key to the cultural transformation towards peacemaking within our community-participatory approach to violence prevention. The community members themselves must do the work for true social change to occur.
As the Urban Institute says in its “"Equitable Compensation for Community Engagement Guidebook," "In participatory work, we must remember that we are engaging with individuals as colleagues and partners, not as research subjects, constituents, or program participants. Paying people for their time is not an incentive; it’s compensation for their expertise."
Gaining community members' trust, engaging with them equitably, and working immersively around the clock with them helps community members share why violence occurs in their lives. We use this information to build peacemaking plans, mediations, trainings, and peer counseling. We enroll interlocking family groups of diverse genders and ages, and help them cultivate healing. Our daily healthy food initiative for enrolled youth and families has played a major role in our violence prevention work.
In all of our work, we understand youth and families through a culturally-sensitive “asset narrative” based on the gifts they bring, rather than a “deficit narrative” that focuses on what’s wrong with them. With training and education, community members become their own best assets as they lead their own uplift.
Our work is 100 percent free/no-cost for community members. In other words, we accept no fees or gifts from community members and our institutional partner, the McKim Center (except for $25 that we ask parents to contribute to help bring the children enrolled in our summer program to a fun amusement or adventure park). To support our work, we fundraise, offer consultations and trainings to organizations, and provide communications/editorial/media services.
Please donate to better the lives of the people we serve.
We are deeply grateful to our present and past individual and organizational supporters and funders, including the NoVo Foundation, William Jordan, Gunpowder Friends, the Miles White Beneficial Society, the Black Trans Fund, Youth As Resources, the Baltimore Development Corporation, Education First, the Chesapeake Bay Trust, and Individual Donors via Patreon.
Our work has high impact. We prevent and eliminate incidents of violence for the youth and families enrolled in our programs. We decisively uplift the organizations with whom we partner. Your donations changes lives for peace, equality, and wellness.
Become a Patron of Wisdom Projects and support us with recurring monthly donations for just the price of a cup of coffee at https://www.patreon.com/wisdomcommunity.
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Copyright © 2024 Wisdom Projects, Inc.
All images drawn from programming used with permission of the subjects | Stock photos drawn from free databases or used with license. Faces in some images may be intentionally blurred to protect individuals' identities. Click here to view our POLICIES.