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 trained as "peacemakers" work through their traumas and conflicts peacefully? Can a new culture of peace transform the health and wellness of youth 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 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 community organizing, community education, and community healing.
Wisdom Projects has two divisions: the Chicago Wisdom Project (founded in 2009 and focused on thought leadership for anti-oppressive holistic education) and the Baltimore Wisdom Project (founded in 2012 and focused on grassroots community organizing for violence prevention through peace education and STEM education for youth and families). Wisdom Projects is the result of the 2019 merger of both divisions into one nonprofit organization.
The Chicago Wisdom Project publishes thought leadership about anti-oppressive holistic education in the ReImagining Magazine and the ReImagining Podcast and convenes the ReImagining Education Collective. This thought is used deeply within peacemaking training sessions for youth and adults at the Baltimore Wisdom Project.
Wisdom Projects also provides private consultations for businesses and schools emphasizing Afro-Indigenous approaches to strategic direction, organizational healing, restorative justice, and conflict resolution. Contact us to discuss our consultative services.
Each year, the Baltimore Wisdom Projects' six peacemaking programs empower approximately 200 low-income predominately Black youth, parents, and other family members to become trained peacemakers who lead grassroots campaigns to prevent violence in their homes, schools, neighborhoods, and the street. These community members live in housing projects or subsidized housing in East Baltimore. We embed ourselves daily within this East Baltimore community and help constituents practice the wisdom of 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 6-18 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.
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. 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.