Our community members—that we call Peacemakers—make video campaigns that join with word-of-mouth, trauma-informed messaging to change the tide of violence in their community.
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.
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.
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 also provides private consultations and professional development for businesses, organizations, health facilities, and schools emphasizing restorative, just, and inclusive approaches to strategic direction, organizational healing, trauma-informed care, and workplace conflict resolution. Recently, we consulted with Watershed Progressive and Restorative Response Baltimore. Contact us to discuss our consultative services.
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.
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.
Please donate to better the lives of the people we serve.
We are deeply grateful to our present and past individual and organizational supporters and funders, including the NoVo Foundation, Gunpowder Friends, the Miles White Beneficial Society, the Black Trans Fund, Youth As Resources, the Baltimore Development Corporation, Education First, the Chesapeake Bay Trust, and Individual Donors via Patreon.
Our work has high impact. We prevent and eliminate incidents of violence for the youth and families enrolled in our programs. We decisively uplift the organizations with whom we partner. Your donations changes lives for peace, equality, and wellness.
Become a Patron of Wisdom Projects and support us with recurring monthly donations for just the price of a cup of coffee at https://www.patreon.com/wisdomcommunity.
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Copyright © 2024 Wisdom Projects, Inc.
All images drawn from programming used with permission of the subjects | Stock photos drawn from free databases or used with license. Faces in some images may be intentionally blurred to protect individuals' identities. Click here to view our POLICIES.