tree turtle | Cleis Abeni (she/her)

Executive Director, Wisdom Projects, Inc.

tree turtle (Cleis Abeni)--affectionately known as Miss tree--comes from the same low-income community (including the housing projects and foster homes) of Wisdom Projects' community. She carries this deep cultural centeredness with her every day in her work with vulnerable youth and families, and her firsthand experiences as a victim and survivor of violence and the carceral system inform her research, program creation, and program implementation for peace. 

tree (one of the organization's co-founders) serves as Wisdom Projects' lead administrator, program designer, educator, and healer. A peacemaker, naturalist, and environmentalist, tree is a seasoned Black woman community organizer who has trained social change practitioners in the Mid-Atlantic region, and consulted on conflict resolution and public safety for many organizations for decades. 

For over 30-plus years, she has developed and implemented innovative, high-impact, data-driven community health, community education, and community healing programs for low-income youth, elders, and parents in schools, community centers, recreation centers, jails, and prisons. 

In 1989, at the invitation of Lee Stern, she began leading a monthly de-escalation group for young men at the Lorton Correctional Complex outside of Washington, D.C where she taught the late Dante Barksdale, the co-founder of the violence interruption organization called Safe Streets. 

After the 1991 shooting and killing of her 16-year-old after-school student, Andre Carter, in Washington, D.C., tree began devising peacemaking programs that specifically reached youth, their parents, their relations, and close friends using a family-centered public health approach to combat neighborhood violence and crime. 

Believing that peacemaking efforts are most effective when community members co-lead the practices, today she specializes in the creation and development of grassroots, community-participatory policies and practices for violence prevention, crime deterrence, and public safety. She also integrates healing with STEM, civics, animal welfare, environmentalism, and arts education. 

tree is a veteran clinician and health navigator. She is a former RN (registered nurse), RNP (registered nurse in psychiatry), LPN (licensed practical nurse), and LSW (licensed social worker). One of her foremost nursing teachers at the Capital Health Institute School of Practical Nursing was the late Baba Chuck Davis.

She worked night shifts at DC General, Maryland General, Providence Hospital, the Walter P. Carter Center, FutureCare, Hahnemann Hospital, St. Joseph's Hospital, Ohio Reformatory for Women, and the Ohio Hospital for Psychiatry while teaching or serving in the nonprofit sector during the day. 

With a certificate in trauma-informed care from the Armstrong School (under the tutelage of her friend, the late Dr. Amos N. Wilson), tree was also a school nurse and one of the earliest architects of the health studies program at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in Baltimore City.

An experienced grant-writer and fundraiser, she has helped uplift the strategic communications, operations, programming, and/or fundraising as a staff member or manager for such nonprofit organizations as the following: 

• The Gospel Spreading Network;
• The Rev. Vernon Dobson group within BUILD—Baltimoreans United In Leadership Development; 
• The Institute for Survey Research; 
• Sybil Music & Dance; 
• Many Voices; 
• The Bethune Museum and Archives; 
• The Shakespeare Theatre Company; 
• The Inner Harbor Project (where she wrote the organization's community mediation handbook and helped train police in the downtown district in de-escalation and community policing); 
• The Writing Center at Temple University; and
• The Writing Centers at Goucher College.

She also co-founded three pioneering international anti-violence NGOs:

1. Genders Within International Rescue League;

2. the Innerground Railroad Project; and 

3. Rak Kun Kham Phes Project (รักคนข้ามเพศ/Rạk khn k̄ĥām pheṣ̄).

These pioneering organizations offered healing and rescues for oppressed women and LGBTQ+ individuals in Southeast Asia, West Africa, and the Caribbean.

She has served in a managerial capacity to ensure the fidelity of mindfulness and mindful movement on several research teams. 

She was one of five Program Managers for an initiative called Children’s Behavioral Health Interventions, a joint program of St Joseph's Hospital, Hahnemann Hospital, Lewis Ada H Middle School, and four other under-served schools in the greater Philadelphia region. 

She was also a Mindful Movement Instructor II in the Center for Neurodevelopmental and Imaging Research at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in residence at the Franklin Square Elementary/Middle School. 

For many years annually, tree worked as an animal behaviorist for cows, horses, and other wildlife at the Maryland State Fair through the now-defunct group called Animal Friends where she combined mindfulness and massotherapy based on her studies at Midwest Holistic in the middle 1990s, offering acupressure for the animals. She still cares for birds rescued from pet stores, integrating them into her STEM lessons with children and youth.

She earned an interdisciplinary BA from Goucher; a MA in science writing and poetry from Johns Hopkins University; and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts with a specialization in mindful movement from the Ohio State University. She earned certificates from the Center for Conflict Resolution in Illinois and Midwest Holistic in Ohio.

A 2001 Pushcart Prize award-winner for best writing published in small presses, tree is a widely published poet, writer and journalist and a freelance professional editor with additional expertise in graphic design and videography. 

tree is a seasoned mindfulness and mindful movement educator and the architect of a mindfulness system called Community Participatory Mindfulness™. 

She trained extensively in holistic healing and peacemaking rooted in mindfulness across Asia, at locales like the Guangdong Traditional Chinese Medicine School and Wat Phra Dhammakaya in Thailand where she originally ordained over 30-plus years ago as a Buddhist Upāsikā. 

She trained in such mindful movement systems as Alexander Technique with William and Barbara Conable and Body-Mind Centering with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen. She earned Certificates in Yoga for Children and Wat Po Healing as well as Tuina and Qigong Healing. 

tree's legal name and Buddhist ordination name is tree turtle. Her legal name is intentionally spelled lowercase. Click here for more information about her names. 

In 1991, at a time when most anti-violence programs in the DMV area were geared towards boys and men (an incredibly important emphasis), she became one of the first fieldworkers to build consciously gender-inclusive violence prevention programming (for boys, girls, and gender-fluid individuals) on the East Coast of the United States after creating two weekend de-escalation and crisis intervention programs at the Market Five Gallery and the Stable Arts Center in Washington, D.C. 

tree is a proud member of the Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict, and Violence (APA Division 48), a proud member of Veterans for Peace (in honor of her uncle, Stevie Jackson); and a longtime peer reviewer for Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology.

Visit treeturtle.com and cleisabeni.com for more information about tree.