Our Story

Can on-the-ground community organizing led by the most marginalized predominately Black people effect policy changes for violence prevention? Can around-the-clock, immersive training in peacemaking methods like de-escalation empower low-income community members to prevent violence? Can community members break cycles of recrimination, retribution, and vengeance and embrace accountability through restorative justice and mediation to work through offenses, disagreements, and 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 fact-centered, evidence-based, science-centered, creativity-enriched, critically-aware, and literacy-focused mindset empower community members to think and act logically, calmly, and creatively? 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-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 are often shut out of policy-making and change-making for public safety. Wisdom Projects' innovative work 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. 

Click here for data and videos about the successful impact of our work. Wisdom Projects is a small nonprofit organization with a big story to tell to the world. That story is this: perpetual ceasefire, grassroots policy change, ongoing mediation, disability-consciousness, emancipatory education, criminal justice reform, abolitionist thinking, and a revolutionary sense of love even when one feels someone does not deserve it—all of these innovations heal and enlighten communities most in need of safety and equality. 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.

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 making and changing policies and practices on a grassroots level within marginalized communities to build peace, prevent violence, and end inequality for low-income youth, parents, and families. We make change through gender-inclusive, intergenerational, trauma-informed, holistic, and disability-conscious community organizing, community education, and community healing. Peacemaking through life science, environmental justice, and literacy are key within our mission.

Wisdom Projects also provides private consultations for businesses, health facilities, and schools emphasizing restorative, just, and inclusive approaches to strategic direction, organizational healing, and workplace conflict resolution. Contact us to discuss our consultative services.

Each year, the Baltimore Wisdom Project's six peacemaking community organizing and community healing programs empower approximately 215 low-income predominately Black youth, parents, and other family members (biological relations and chosen kin) to become trained Community Health Workers (or CHWs) that we call "Peacemakers." These peacemakers lead grassroots campaigns to prevent violence and recast justice within their homes, schools, neighborhoods, and the street. Their campaigns show that the most marginalized people can make and change policies and practices. Their campaigns are launched by word-of-mouth or through multimedia within their social media and online networks. 

To view video testimonials that include examples of their campaigning, visit the Impact page of our website. The Peacemakers live in housing projects or subsidized housing in East Baltimore's Jonestown neighborhood. Wisdom Projects staff members embed ourselves daily within this East Baltimore community and help constituents practice the wisdom of trauma-informed and disability-sensitive 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 5-18 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.

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."

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. 

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