"Tony"'s story of gun violence prevention

Headquartered in Baltimore City, Maryland, Wisdom Projects (officially, Wisdom Projects, Inc. doing-business-as the Baltimore Wisdom Project) is a 15-year-old secular 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization (EIN: 27-1060325) committed to peace, safety, and equality for low-income youth and families. We make and change policies and practices on a grassroots level within marginalized communities to prevent violence, and end inequality.

In our community-participatory approach, we partner with people who have endured incarceration, gun violence, domestic violence, and other forms of harm to make change through gender-inclusive, intergenerational, trauma-informed care. We are particularly focused on healing PTSD for survivors of violence. 

We enact criminal justice reform by providing neighborhood-level alternatives to policing, prosecuting, judging, and incarcerating with deep practices of whole-community healing and accountability.

The people enrolled in our six programs receive training in de-escalation, trauma informed care, conflict resolution, and restorative justice as they become Community Health Workers that we call "Peacemakers." The Peacemakers then make and disseminate anti-violence campaigns by word-of-mouth in their homes, schools, and on the streets as well as by video in their online or social media networks. They also co-lead a variety of kinds of mediations.

We help people most affected by violence, incarceration, and inequality become trained, grassroots public health leaders in their neighborhoods so they do the work of making their communities safe by and for themselves.

We practice community organizing, community education, and community healing with a holistic, disability-conscious understanding. Peacemaking through life science, environmental justice, and literacy are key within our mission.

Our work has eliminated homicides and suicides among enrollees, and drastically reduced rates of domestic violence, eviction, and gun possession, while uplifting community members' coping skills with PTSD, poverty, anxiety, and depression. Visit the Impact page of our website for video testimonials from community members' campaigns, as well as data about our outcomes, and information about how we measure our success.

We have pioneered community healing projects in West Baltimore at sites like the Penn North Kids Safe Zone and the Harambee Center and in Greenmount East Baltimore at the 29th Street Community Center. 

Currently, we are in the sixth year of a long-term community healing project in East Baltimore with residents of 6 low-income housing projects as the official Educational and Health Services Partner of the McKim Center.

Wisdom Projects is also exploring becoming an Advisor for In-School Suspension at Forth Worthington Elementary/Middle School where we share healing and peacemaking practices to enhance the behavioral health of the students and scholars.

Wisdom Projects also provide healing and peacemaking services for schools, businesses, organizations, hospitals, and health facilities, and schools emphasizing restorative, just, and inclusive approaches to behavioral health, strategic direction, trauma-informed care, and workplace conflict resolution. Recently, we consulted with Watershed Progressive and Restorative Response Baltimore and we have worked with schools like Franklin Square Elementary/Middle School. Contact us to discuss our consultative services.

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."

• Can on-the-ground community organizing led by the most marginalized, low-to-middle income survivors of violence and crime effect policy changes for violence prevention? 
• Can around-the-clock, immersive training in peacemaking methods like de-escalation and conflict resolution empower youth and young adults aged 6-24 to join with their parents and families (both biological and chosen kin) to prevent violence? 
• Can community members break cycles of recrimination, retribution, and vengeance and embrace accountability through restorative justice and mediation to work through disputes? 
• Can community members with disabilities who have survived violence and who are formerly incarcerated (or impacted by the criminal justice system) organize themselves to become "peacemakers"? 
• Can the cultivation of a science-centered, creative, critical, and literate mindset empower community members to think and act logically, calmly, and imaginatively? 
• Can their community-organizing help them work through their traumas while managing conflicts peacefully? 
• Governments, the police, and businesses—entities that we respect—often own public safety. Can community-rooted policies and practices help grassroots people own public safety too? 

The work of Wisdom Projects answers YES to these questions. We partner with low-to-middle income, disabled, and formerly incarcerated people-of-color who receive public assistance, who live in "high crime" areas, who experience multiple forms of brutality, and who live in housing projects. These people's voices are not often amplified for policy-making and change-making for public safety. Wisdom Projects' innovative work co-led by the community members themselves proves decisively that fresh ideas and practices for peace led by marginalized people can stem the tide of violence and rethink justice from a public health perspective. 

Our work proves that policy change can flourish within, by, and for grassroots communities. It is our hope that our work sets an example of the power of data-driven, evidence-supported grassroots policies and practices for peace from the ground up.

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, education, 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.