Cleis Abeni | tree turtle (she/her)

Executive Director, Wisdom Projects, Inc.

Director (CEO), Baltimore Wisdom Project

Cleis Abeni (tree turtle) serves as Wisdom Projects' lead administrator, program designer, educator, and healer. A peacemaker, naturalist, and environmentalist, Miss Abeni is a seasoned Black woman community organizer who has trained social change practitioners in the Mid-Atlantic region, and consulted on workplace conflict resolution 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, she began leading a monthly de-escalation group for young men at the Lorton Correctional Complex outside of Washington, D.C. After the 1991 shooting and killing of her 16-year-old after-school student, Andre Carter, in Washington, D.C., Miss Abeni began devising peacemaking programs that specifically reached youth and their parents, using a family-centered public health approach to combat neighborhood violence and crime. 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, and arts education. 

Miss Abeni 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). She worked night shifts at DC General, Maryland General, Providence Hospital, the Walter P. Carter Center, FutureCare, Hahnemann Hospital, St. Joseph's Hospital, and the Ohio Hospital for Psychiatry while teaching or serving in the nonprofit sector during the day. With a certificate in trauma-informed care, Miss Abeni was also a school nurse and one of the 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, and/or fundraising for such nonprofit organizations as 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; and the writing center at Goucher College where she earned an interdisciplinary BA in English, Peace Studies, Philosophy and Religion, and Theater Arts. 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)--that 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.

A 2001 Pushcart Prize award-winner for best writing published in small presses, Miss Abeni is a widely published writer and journalist and a freelance professional editor with additional expertise in graphic design and videography. She holds the following advanced degrees: a MA in science writing and poetry from Johns Hopkins University; and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts, Education, and Dance (with a specialization in mindful movement) from the Ohio State University. 

Miss Abeni's legal name is tree turtle. She is an ordained Buddhist Upāsikā and her legal name is intentionally spelled lowercase. Click here for more information about her names. 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 became ordained.  

In 1991, she became one of the first ordained Buddhist women of gender-nonconforming experience to build gender-inclusive violence prevention programming on the East Coast of the United States after creating two weekend de-escalation programs for girls and boys at the Market Five Gallery and the Stable Arts Center in Washington, D.C. 

Visit treeturtle.com and cleisabeni.com for more information about Miss Abeni.