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Wisdom Projects (officially, Wisdom Projects, Inc.) is an over 15-year-old secular, grassroots, community-led 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization (EIN: 27-1060325).

We keep some of Baltimore City's most vulnerable community members SAFE by organizing and educating for peace and justice for smart and resourceful low-income youth and families challenged by poverty, violence, and carceral systems. 

All of us (or our loved ones) have been impacted by the criminal justice system (including our senior staff). All of us are survivors of multifaceted violence and trauma, including our Executive Director. We train and work every day to overcome our challenges.

Wisdom Projects' high-impact, scalable, intergenerational and gender inclusive work has eliminated homicides and suicides in our population, and drastically reduced rates of such challenges as incarceration, domestic violence, and eviction. 

Our restorative, healing, and conflict-resolving work in the state of Maryland and the city of Baltimore provides a powerful, community participatory alternative to policing, prosecuting, and incarcerating.

Every day we discover that, for our most vulnerable, high-poverty community members in the housing projects of East Baltimore, preventing violence and building pathways to wellness and economic power must involve high-quality, holistic, and integrative peace education.

Our programs involve intensive, immersive organizing and educating to create and disseminate grassroots, abolitionist peacemaking policies and methods. These policies and methods include de-escalation, mindfulness, trauma informed care, conflict resolution, environmental justice, art therapy, animal rights, Social and Emotional Learning, and restorative justice. This work guides us to become Community Health Workers that we call "Peacemakers." 

Our six programs are as follows:

1. A STEM & Healing Arts Peacemaking Afterschool Program in partnership with the McKim Center.
2. A Youth Peacemakers Workforce Development Program: Teens aged 14-24 pass on peacemaking methods in our afterschool program to our Peace Cubs (aged 5-10) and our Peace Buds (aged 11-14). 
3. A Parent Peacemakers Programs Workforce Development Program for parents aged 24 and above who work in the afterschool program and their homes and neighborhoods to cultivate peace.
4. A Summer Peacemaking Camp in partnership with the McKim Center.
5. Planet Protectors Laboratories: Twice Monthly Environmental Justice and Literacy Labs.
6. Conflict Resolution Education and Services: Weekly Mediations; Monthly Amnesty Days; and Long-term Truth & Reconciliation Sessions.

Our Youth and Parent Peacemakers make and disseminate video campaigns that join with word-of-mouth, trauma-informed messaging to change the tide of violence in our communities. 

Youth and families also receive extensive wrap-around support to mitigate poverty:

• Healthy Foodways for Peace Initiative: One daily homemade, low-salt, low-sugar hot meal with fresh fruits and veggies to uplift peace and combat food insecurity for youth and families enrolled in our programming.
• Safe Passage Services.
• Caring Funds.
• Rescue Funds.
• Haircuts.

We are proud to serve as the official Educational and Health Services Partner of the McKim Center, a site of the Underground Railroad, where our programming is in-residence at the 1781 McKim Meeting House Building. 

We are a member of the Global Alliance for Behavioral Health and Social Justice.

We a part of the Baltimore City Schools Partners in Education (PIE) initiative, and currently, we work with children and youth who attend ten schools, including City Springs, Johnson Square, Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, KIPP, Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women, Roland Park, Digital Harbor, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Reach, and Carver.

Our family-centered, community participatory approach is what makes us most innovative. 

Our teen and adult Peacemakers teach our elementary-aged Peace Cubs and our middle-school aged Peace Buds how to de-escalate crises, manage conflicts restoratively, overcome their trauma, and make wise, healthy decisions. Likewise, our teens and adults cross-train each other in peacemaking heuristics to cultivate neighborhood nonviolence year-round.

Trained community members ourselves (youth, parents, extended relations, and chosen kin--including our most senior staff) steer, research, and help manage our diversionary programming. We uplift ourselves and each other. 

Intergenerational and inter-gender mentoring is key. 

We spread the wisdom of nonviolence--no justice without peace; no peace without justice--in our homes, workplaces, schools, and the streets. 

Rates for violence have decreased city-wide. Yet, according to the Baltimore City Police Department's year-end crime report, Baltimore still had 414 non-fatal shootings and 201 fatal shootings in 2024. There remains a persistent need for violence prevention and intervention.

Much of the city's violence arguably occurs in high-poverty and high-crime zones where homicides and suicides join with other forms of harm like domestic and intimate partner violence, violent drug activity, sexual assault, and sex trafficking. Baltimore's low-income housing zones and areas with abandoned or derelict properties remain some of the city's most high-risk zones for multifaceted violence. 

Wisdom Projects' high-impact, data-driven, scalable, intergenerational, family-centered, gender inclusive, and community participatory work joins with other grassroots anti-violence movements to decisively reduce violence in Baltimore. 

Our profound innovations have eliminated homicides and suicides among youth and adults enrolled in our programs and drastically reduced rates of such challenges as incarceration, domestic violence, eviction, school expulsion, truancy, addiction, and weapons possession. 

Visit the Impact page of our website for comprehensive data about how we are realizing our clinical outcomes, and information about how we measure our success. 

Our Impact webpage also links to video testimonials.

But, our work is ongoing and persistently necessary. Our community members still contend with police brutality, reduction or denial of public assistance, mistreatment from rental agents in the housing projects, mental health struggles, and harms like sex trafficking and felonious robbery and larceny.

Our work stands out because of our consciously multifaceted, holistic, abolitionist and integrative approach. We focus on multiple, overlapping outcomes and practices to combat not just gun violence but an array of co-occurring harms that combine with systemic, state-level injustices.

In recognition of our peace education approach, Wisdom Projects won three Social and Emotional Learning Innovation Awards from Education First.

Annually, we directly enroll and serve the following:

• Peace Cubs: At least 50 children aged 5-9.
• Peace Buds: At least 50 youth aged 10-13.
• Youth Peacemakers: At least 25 youth and young adults aged 14-24.
• Parent Peacemakers: At least 75 parents and grandparents aged 25-71.
• Extended Kin Peacemakers: At least 25 uncles, aunts, cousins, and extended chosen kin of enrolled families.

Our total annual enrollment is at least 225 people, with roughly the same population monthly. 

At the same time, our Peacemakers' work changes the culture in their neighborhoods and touches the lives of scores of extended relations and neighbors annually. 

Thus, we estimate from weekly and monthly reports on apps like Citizen that document the reduction of violence and crime in our area, that our expanded indirect reach more than doubles our direct enrollment numbers to be approximately 500 people annually. 

We pride ourselves on very individuated, close connections and with greater capacity and staffing, we hope to reach more.

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 organizers 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."

Spreading good news about our methods and practices is key to our work. Wisdom Projects provides healing and peacemaking consultations for schools, businesses, organizations, hospitals, health facilities, and schools emphasizing restorative, just, and inclusive approaches to behavioral health, school discipline/behavior, 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.