Uplifting the WISDOM of peace.

The work of Wisdom Projects (officially, Wisdom Projects, Inc.) begins with a critical, deep notion: Children and youth should never be harmed and they should learn to do no harm. When we uplift peace and prevent violence for our youngest, we set a standard of justice for families, adults, businesses, governments, and everyone.

We are now in our 16th year as a secular, grassroots, community-led 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization (EIN: 27-1060325) devoted to violence prevention, peace education, justice advocacy, and workforce development for youth and families. We are especially committed to partnering with survivors and victims of gun violence and related harm who live in or near so-called "high crime" zones or who live or lived in East Baltimore's subsidized housing. 

Our work is hands-on, immersive, and direct, occurring on site daily at the 1781 McKim Center Meeting House. We also work in the neighborhoods and online with intensive media campaigns, including many led by youth on Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, X/Twitter, and Threads.

We focus on helping youth and families make wise decisions that keep them safe from multiple forms of injustice--including crime, violence, and inequity. We help them mitigate PTSD and co-occurring conditions like depression, substance addiction, and impulse control disorders. Through intensive peace education, peer counseling, conflict management, de-escalation training, and trauma-informed care, we divert youth and families from harm. We integrate this work with studies in life science, environmental justice, math, chemistry, and art therapy.

We are part of a movement of grassroots community and neighborhood groups like  Peace For DC, Mute the Violence DC, and the Ward 5 Violence Prevention Network (to name just a few) in the Baltimore-Washington, D.C. area that are leading the reduction of crime and violence and the uplifting of improved mental health in our region.

We innovate peace entrepreneurship. We train and compensate low-income teenage youth and their kin for their work as peacemakers in their neighborhoods. They then cross-train their kinfolk and peers in peacemaking heuristics like de-escalation and conflict resolution. We prepare and connect them with gainful employment that peaceful, healthy conduct invites. Valuing and practicing peace become a touchstone for uplifting multifaceted prosperity in our youth's lives.

Since 2019, we have 

☑️ eliminated homicides and suicides in our population; 

☑️ reduced rates of domestic and intimate partner violence from a high of 46 percent to a low of 13 percent; 

☑️ reduced youth arrests to 4 percent and youth convictions to 1 percent;

☑️ helped our community members disarm;

☑️ helped our community members commit to recovery from addiction;

☑️ drastically lowered rates of eviction, suspension, expulsion, and truancy; and 

☑️ made headways in eradicating robberies, corporal punishment, child abuse, and sex trafficking.

Visit our IMPACT PAGE to read data about how we measure our success.

Rooted in restorative justice, our six programs are as follows:

1. A  daily STEM & Healing Arts Peacemaking Afterschool Program in partnership with the McKim Center, the oldest continuously active community center in the United States and a site of the Underground Railroad in the 19th century.
2. A daily 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) while  making and disseminating video campaigns that join with word-of-mouth, trauma-informed messaging to change the tide of violence in our communities.  
3. A Parent Peacemakers Workforce Development Program for select parents aged 24 and above who work in the afterschool program and in their homes and neighborhoods to cultivate peace.
4. A daily Summer Peacemaking Camp in July in partnership with the McKim Center.
5. Planet Protectors Laboratories: Twice monthly Environmental Justice and Literacy Labs linking peace, and justice with environmentalism and often using a community documentary method called PhotoVoice.
6. Weekly Conflict Resolution Services with mediations; monthly "Amnesty Days" emphasizing collective apology and making amends; and long-term Truth & Reconciliation sessions.

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--daily transportation.
• Caring Funds to support phone use, rent, energy, and more.
• Rescue Funds.
• Haircuts.

Peace is great for business! When our Youth and Parent Peacemakers learn and practice core skills for peaceful conduct like deescalation and conflict management, and we match them with training and employment as lab techs, plumbers, medical assistants, and more, then they uplift economic development in their communities. 

Key to our approach is the compensating of youth and parents as Community Health Workers (CHWs), which we call Peacemakers. Our adolescent and young adult Peacemakers work with younger children in our afterschool program as well as with their kin and community in their homes, schools, neighborhood, and on the street to cultivate peace. They also make messaging campaigns with videos and posts on social media to teach their networks about nonviolence.

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."

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.

We recruit, serve, hire, and partner with community members who primarily live in subsidized housing units within 5 housing projects in East Baltimore that are mostly within or very close to the 21202 zip code within 5 minutes walking of the McKim Center in the Jonestown neighborhood close to the downtown near East or Harbor East regions: 

1. Pleasant View Gardens;
2. Albemarle Square;
3. Latrobe Homes;
4. Douglass Homes; and
5. New Perkins Homes.

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. 

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.

Our community members, which we call Peacemakers, are smart and resourceful 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 work with community members who are most at-risk for multifaceted violence--from police brutality to neighborhood violence. 

We are most at risk because we are frequently disabled (but never dis-empowered) low-to-middle-income Black and Brown people who live or were reared in some of the most economically depressed zip codes of the city where housing, food, and health insecurities and disparities abound. 

This work is very difficult, but we keep moving towards accountability, amends, and apology. If it is appropriate, then we also realize amnesty, reconciliation, reciprocity, and even forgiveness. 

Sometimes the need to protect ourselves along with the grave nature of the harm and the failure of offenders to hold themselves accountable makes these latter states inappropriate. Even still, we keep returning to the work of managing conflicts nonviolently.

When we educate and organize for peace, our work has a tremendous ripple effect within our zip codes, helping people and businesses work towards three essential truths: 

• We all want to be safe; 

• We all want to be healthy; and 

• We all want to be loved.

Every day, we train and work to overcome our trauma. 

In our trauma-informed care, we delve deep into our senses, feelings, memories, and actions. 

We try to manage 7 common responses to traumatic triggers--"the Fs" of fight, freeze, flop, fawn, flee, finagle, and flashback. 

We build reflective, sensitive, and caring interpersonal and intergenerational relationships.

We practice managing, transforming, and resolving conflicts without resorting to aggression. We move from protective to connective feelings and talk through emotional regulation while never denying ourselves the full measure of our sentiments. 

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, trauma-informed, and integrative peace education.