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Wisdom Projects (officially, Wisdom Projects, Inc.) is an over 15-year-old secular, nonpartisan 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization (EIN: 27-1060325) that organizes and educates for peace, nonviolence, and justice for low-income youth, adults, and families. 

In our currently piloted Peacemaking Initiative, we work in close partnership with East Baltimoreans who have survived harm and who struggle to overcome mental health challenges to prevent violence, elevate behavioral wellness, and combat inequality towards community members.

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

While participating in weekly conflict mediations and monthly support groups, the youth, adults, and families enrolled in our six main programs receive intensive, immersive peacemaking training in de-escalation, mindfulness, trauma informed care, conflict resolution, art therapy, Social and Emotional Learning, and restorative justice as they become Community Health Workers that we call "Peacemakers." 

The older youth and adult Peacemakers then make and disseminate anti-violence campaigns for themselves and others by word-of-mouth in their homes, schools, and on the streets as well as by video in their online or social media networks. 

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

Now approximately five years into its pilot stage, our work has already eliminated homicides and suicides among the population enrolled in our programming, and drastically reduced rates among enrollees of incarceration, police brutality, domestic violence, bullying, eviction, school suspension, expulsion, truancy, failing grades, crime, and gun possession. 

Our work greatly increases community members' environmentalist consciousness and their ability to advocate for social change at the intersection of poverty, the environment, and peacemaking. Community members peacemaking campaigns have addressed issues like flooding, high energy rates, power outages, pollution, and lead poisoning that directly impact their low-income communities. 

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

Visit the Impact page of our website for video testimonials from community members' campaigns, as well as comprehensive data about how we are realizing our clinical outcomes, and  information about how we measure our success.

As an initiative devoted to community healing, our work uplifts the following aspects of community members' lives:

• Their leadership capacities;
• Their body-mind wellness;
• Their capacity to manage, transform, and resolve conflicts;
• Their sense of accountability when making mistakes; 
• Their relationship-building and pro-social skills;
• Their employment skills so that they acquire and keep jobs;
• Their scholastic skills so they excel in learning situations or school;
• Their capacity to overcome their trauma;
• Their ability to keep themselves, their families, and their peers safe; and
• Their coping skills with PTSD, poverty, anxiety, depression, and other serious mental health experiences like schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder and bipolar disorder. 

Every day we fight the stigma attached to having mental health conditions by proving that, with the help of uplifting, immersive, daily nonviolent methods, community members can be productive, present, well, and safe.

Our holistic, disability-conscious, data-driven, and evidence-based violence prevention work stands out in the mid-Atlantic region because it is co-led by trained community members themselves. 

We call this a "community-participatory" healing approach. In our community-participatory approach, we partner with people who have endured incarceration, gun violence, domestic violence, addiction, poverty, and other forms of harm, and we support them as they make change and build peace within themselves and in their homes, schools, and neighborhoods through gender-inclusive, intergenerational, trauma-informed care. 

Everything we do involves realizing our evidence-supported clinical outcomes.

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."

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.

Gaining community members' trust, engaging with them equitably, and working immersively around the clock with them helps community members share why violence and dysfunction 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 while combating food insecurity. 

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 main institutional partner, the McKim Center (except for around $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.