Two wonderful girls within our programming hold their earthworm terrariums.

Wisdom Projects’ programming and consultations empower us (youth and adults) to build peace within ourselves at home, in school, at work, and on the streets as we do the following:

• Make wise decisions.

• Work through our trauma.

• Manage conflicts instead of resorting to violence, offense, or harm. 

• De-escalate.

• Maintain wholeness and wellness.

We empower ourselves by realizing the evidence-based clinical, organizational, and educational outcomes overviewed on this web-page.

These outcomes are holistic. This means that these outcomes are always overlapping and integrating with each other as we achieve peace and wellness in our bodies, minds, and spirits. 

(Here "spirit" refers to secular ethical considerations of what is just and healthy.)

When we say that our work is "evidence-based," we mean that it is supported by extensive clinical and liberation-centered research. In presenting these outcomes on this web-page, we take care to cite key evidence that supports our approach. 

We continually organize, educate, and achieve three core, interrelated overall milestones:

1. Present in all areas of our lives at home, school, work and in the streets (fully invested in achieving justice and exhibiting peaceful, wise, conscious, liberation-centered decision-making).
2. Well (exhibiting balanced, positive physical, mental, and behavioral health).
3. Safe (being free from violence and adversity).

To achieve these milestones, we push to gain results in 20 metrics and we evaluate the percentage of our community members who fulfill these metrics each year:

1. Ending homicides and suicides. 
2. Reducing evictions. 
3. Strengthening peaceful families. 
4. Disarming. 
5. Reducing domestic violence. 
6. Reducing youth arrests and convictions. 
7. Reducing adult incarceration. 
8. Reducing violence against women, trans, nonbinary, and LGBTQ+ individuals. 
9. Reducing verbal violence. 
10. Cultivating recovery.
11. Reducing corporal punishment.
12. Elevating mental health. 
13. Reducing stress and anxiety. 
14. Uplifting leadership capacities.
15. Cultivating improved senses of self. 
16. Coping with poverty. 
17. Coping with bias. 
18. Improved scholastic achievement. 
19. Improved foodways. 
20. Enhanced disease prevention.

The rubric "present, well, and safe" comes from Brenda Strong Nixon (1943-2001).

Community Organizing Outcomes

As community organizers, we aim to change policies, practices, and procedures for peace and justice. 

We change policies for ourselves and for the neighborhoods, societies, and communities within which we live, learn, and work.

Our policies transform us and everyone who embraces them through restorative justice, liberation theory and practice, de-escalation, trauma-informed care, Community Participatory Mindfulness, conflict resolution and education, and Social and Emotional Learning. (See the select sources below pertaining to liberation theory and practice.)

Community Educating Outcomes

There can be no organizing without educating.

Organizing for a peaceful and just world must center educating for a peaceful and just world. 

We must learn how to be and treat others justly and peacefully and immerse ourselves in the best educating that advances our learning.

So many community organizing endeavors are highjacked because the organizers have not immersed themselves in the ongoing self-critiquing and society-critiquing educating necessary to forge true liberation. They begin to organize solely as a career for acclaim rather than centering in the communities that are our lifeblood and doing the work as a life-course without aggrandizement. We keep repudiating these problems over and over again so we stay community-centered and community participatory.

Along with the practices that feed our community organizing outcomes, we educate for the science, art, and culture of healing and environmental justice.

As we process through the programming, we continually engage in wise decision-making (or holistic discernment) that cultivates allostasis.

Allostasis means that we maintain stability, safety, and good health by being able to think-through obstacles and challenges, and adapt to changes and pressures physiologically and behaviorally. Increasing our brains' critical thinking capacities is key to allostasis.

Enrollees engage in mindfulness and other calming practices to monitor allostatic overload (also called allostatic load). Allostatic overload occurs when chronic stressors place high demands on our ability to cope and adapt to obstacles, trauma, and challenges. 

Enrollees manage goals and expectations as they learn focus, awareness, and calm--essential qualities of mindfulness to achieve physiological and behavioral stability.

See Jay Schulkin's anthology of research entitled Allostasis, Homeostasis, and the Costs of Physiological Adaptation.

Enrollees also cultivate a science-centered, creative, critical, and literate mindset that empowers community members to think and act logically and imaginatively as they problem-solve challenges in their lives. 

A key part of this cultivation involves engaging Social and Emotional Learning (SEL). 

Click here for an overview of our approach to culturally-responsive SEL.

Rebecca E. Vieyra's "Peace in Science Education: A Literature Review" from the Journal of Peace Education and Mukesh Tiwary's "Need of Science Education for Peace and Harmony" in the International Journal of Literacy and Education have helped us integrate STEM education, peacemaking, and healing within our programming.

Click here to learn more on holistic discernment and ethical decision-making.

As we process through the programming, we practice how to apply trauma-informed care (TIC) to regulate their emotions, relate pro-socially with kinfolk, and reason through obstacles as they mitigate 7 common experiences of traumatic impact (often identified as "the Fs": fight, freeze, flop, fawn, flee, finagle, and flashback). See below for a short, downloadable handout on "Human Stress Response or Fight-or-flight Response."

TIC is a system of embodied healing and coping strategies involving, in our model, consciously affirmative nonviolent communication and expression in tandem with immersive mindfulness and peacemaking practices that help people avoid re-traumatization while mitigating symptoms of PTSD, CPTSD, and co-occurring mental health experiences like stress, anxiety, depression, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, impulse control disorder, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia/schizoaffective disorder. We guide youth and adults to regulate emotions and see the world in a fact-based, environmentally-conscious, and civic-aware manner. TIC uplifts wise, calm decision-making, empowerment, safety, collaboration, and trusted relationships. 

Given the seriousness of many community members' disabilities and the high prevalence of substance abuse, in tandem with participating in our programming, enrollees are encouraged to maintain sobriety and receive outpatient medical care and/or psychiatric rehabilitation at hospitals or clinics for their infirmities, and we try to help enrollees select culturally-competent providers based on word-of-mouth testimonies. We have found that the efficacy of Wisdom Projects' holistic heuristics is enhanced by medical and psychiatric cross-interventions.

Wisdom Projects’ implementation of TIC elevates best practices from SAMHSA as well as culturally-responsive approaches to treating trauma-impacted African Americans formulated by clinicians like Dr. Shawn Ginwright, Dr. Joy DeGruy, and the late Dr. Amos N. Wilson with whom Miss Abeni (Wisdom Projects' Executive Director) studied. Natalie Y. Gutiérrez's The Pain We Carry: Healing from Complex PTSD for People of Color has also helped us develop our healing work in TIC to combat PTSD. We are also inspired by Dr. Mariel Buqué's Break the Cycle: A Guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma. 

See the sections below identifying evidence for the effectiveness of mindfulness in healing bipolar disorder and schizophrenia spectrum disorders, and art therapy in healing mental health conditions.

As we process through the programming, we practice how to mediate conflicts well informed by restorative justice as they transform, manage, and resolve disputes peacefully. 

This outcome builds on decades of research from groups like Mediators Beyond Borders and the Dispute Resolution in Mental Health Initiative as well as clinicians like Richard Slatcher and Morteza Deghan Neery confirming that conflict resolution skills enhance prosocial abilities to cope with trauma, achieve good mental health, and build peaceful relationships.

As we process through the programming, we practice how to apply de-escalation immersively in our lives for behavioral impulse control, perpetual nonviolent engagement, and the assessment, prevention, and intervention of crises. 

This outcome draws from the practical recommendations of Brendan King and the research of clinicians like Andreja Celofiga in Frontiers in Psychiatry, Dorothy E. Stubbe in Focus: A Journal of Lifelong Learning in Psychiatry, and Daniel Brenig in BMC Psychiatry on the efficacy of de-escalation to reduce aggression and build capacities for prosocial mental health. It also relies on practical recommendations from Crisis Assessment, Intervention, and Prevention.

This outcome also gains success through Community Participatory Mindfulness™.

As we process through the programming, we cultivate healing and peacemaking for ourselves and in our relationships through the following practices:

• Mutual Aid. See Allison Wiltz's How Black Mutual Aid Groups Paved The Way For Racial Progress; the National Humanities Center's historical notes on "Mutual Benefit" in African American cultures; The History of Black Cooperatives; and books like J.R. Mortimer's Mutual Aid for Beginners: How to Start a Project or Join a Group. Wisdom Projects' free/no-cost Foodways Program (which serves one homemade, low-salt/low-sugar meal each day that we are open) exemplifies our many forms of Mutual Aid (other forms are our Safe Passage Services, our Caring Funds. and our Rescue Funds).

• Peer Support. Monthly peer support groups are a vital feature of our programming. See Charles Drebing's Leading Peer Support and Self-Help Groups: A Pocket Resource for Peer Specialists and Support Group Facilitators; Jewel Rumley Cox's A Guide to Peer Counseling; and Vincent D'Andrea's and Peter Salovey's anthology entitled Peer Counseling: Skills, Ethics, and Perspectives. 

• Community Participatory Mindfulness™ to enhance calm, focus, and awareness; foster de-escalation; uplift reasoned, reasonable, and enlightened senses of self and others; and promote loving-kindness and an end to suffering.

• Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) to help identify and change unhelpful behaviors and thoughts.

• Contingency management (CM) to help stay motivated by providing tangible rewards to acknowledge milestones for positive changes.

• Community reinforcement approach (CRA) to help identify the reasons for wanting to make changes and find healthier ways of coping with stress and other triggers that lead to unhelpful behavior.

• Motivational enhancement (ME) to help individuals engage and stay motivated throughout healing-work.

Recent research in such sources as BMC Psychiatry, Psychological Medicine, BMC Medicine, Mental Health & Prevention, and the International Journal of Nursing Sciences has shown that peer counseling, peer support groups, and peer self-help groups are effective in helping youth and adults manage their behavioral and mental health. 

As we process through the programming, we cultivate an environmentalist consciousness borne of our struggles with environmental injustices in the housing projects and beyond. 

We grew and/or grow up in low-income housing mired by frequent flooding and power outages and problems with pollution and lead poisoning. 

Our Planet Protectors Lab is a centerpiece of our outcome to enhance community members' capacity to integrate peacemaking with environmentalism, and carry out advocacy that helps them combat environmental injustices.

Recent research from Environmental Politics, Environmental Peacebuilding, World Development Sustainability, and the Toda Peace Institute emphasize the pressing need to integrate peace education, peace organizing, and environmental justice. Wisdom Projects innovates by doing this integrative work on a grassroots urban level within multiple marginalized communities.

As soon as youth enter into the community center, they see large pieces of newsprint arrayed on the tables where they sit along with pens and pencils. 

After they get settled, they are encouraged to "draw their feelings" and use visual art to find free-form inner balance.

Most Wednesdays, youth and adults participate in a "Visual Arts for Healing" educational experience that integrates drawing, painting, clay-works, and other visual arts with mindfulness, Social and Emotional Learning, and environmentalism. 

Art therapy plays a key role in uplifting inner peace within the lives of our community members and helping them map and picture wellness in their lives.

Research from the National Alliance on Mental Illness pinpoints how art therapy helps people monitor and regulate symptoms of bipolar disorder. Research in the Journal of Trauma Dissociation argues that people who do not respond to other treatments may benefit from art therapy to cope with their PTSD. A groundbreaking 2022 study in Medicine is examining art therapy's complementary benefits in the clinical treatment of schizophrenia.

Click here to learn about Community Participatory Mindfulness™, the mindfulness initiative engaged at Wisdom Projects.

There is a growing body of evidence that documents the benefits of mindfulness in healing bipolar disorder and schizophrenia spectrum disorders. Here are a few key sources. 

Bipolar Disorder

Among many other sources, the effectiveness of mindfulness in mitigating bipolar disorder is documented in the research of Jonathan P. Strange in the Journal of Psychiatric Practice; David Lovas and Zev Schuman-Olivier in the Journal of Affective Disorders; Sasha D. Strong in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology; and Francisco A. Burgos-Julián in the Journal of Empirical Research in Psychology. Also see the overview concerning mindfulness and bipolar disorder in Mindful Health Solutions. 

Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders

Among many other sources, the effectiveness of mindfulness in healing schizophrenia spectrum disorders is documented in research by Jia‐Ling Sheng in CNS Neuroscience & Therapeutics; Michel Sabé in Schizophrenia Research; and Jiali Dai in BMC Psychiatry. Also see the following overview entitled "How meditation can help sufferers of schizophrenia." 

We are guided by the following additional select sources regarding liberation theory and practice and violence prevention. We only cite select book-length monographs and anthologies here because these sources often include bibliographies that cite journal articles and other primary and secondary sources.

Liberation Theory and Practice

Black Power: The Politics of Liberation by Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamilton (Vintage 1992).

Body Becoming: A Path to Our Liberation by Roberto Che Espinoza (Broadleaf Books 2022).

Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care, and Safety by Cara Page and Erica Woodland (North Atlantic Books 2023).

Lessons in Liberation: An Abolitionist Toolkit for Educators by The Education for Liberation Network & Critical Resistance Editorial Collective (with Bettina L. Love, Mariame Kaba, and Jay Gillen) (AK Press 2021).

Liberation Psychology: Theory, Method, Practice, and Social Justice edited by Lillian Comas-Díaz and Edil Torres Rivera (American Psychological Association 2020).

Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire (Herder and Herder 1970).

Theatre of the Oppressed by Augusto Boal (Pluto Press 1979).

Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion edited by Ryan Conrad (AK Press 2014).

Revolution Is Love: A Year of Black Trans Liberation by Qween Jean and Raquel Willis (Aperture 2022).

Transgender Resistance: Socialism and the Fight for Trans Liberation by Laura Miles (Bookmarks 2020).

Violence Prevention

Assessing and Managing Violence Risk in Juveniles by Randy Borum and David Verhaagen (The Guilford Press 2006).

Black-On-Black Violence: The Psychodynamics of Black Self-Annihilation in Service of White Domination by Amos N. Wilson (Afrikan World Infosystems 1991).

Bullying, Victimization, and Peer Harassment: A Handbook of Prevention and Intervention edited by Joesph E. Zins and others (Routledge 2014).

Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City by Elijah Anderson (W. W. Norton & Company 2000).

Evaluation for Risk of Violence in Juveniles by Robert Hoge and D.A. Andrews (Oxford University Press 2010).

Handbook of Violence Risk Assessment edited by Kevin S. Douglas and Randy K. Otto (Routledge 2020)

Keeping Students Safe and Helping Them Thrive: A Collaborative Handbook on School Safety, Mental Health, and Wellness edited by David Osher and others (Praeger 2019).

Murder Is No Accident: Understanding and Preventing Youth Violence in America by Deborah Prothrow-Stith and Howard R. Spivak (Jossey-Bass 2003).

Oxford Textbook of Violence Prevention: Epidemiology, Evidence, and Policy edited by Peter D. Donnelly and Catherine L. Ward (Oxford University Press 2015).

Policing Gun Violence: Strategic Reforms for Controlling Our Most Pressing Crime Problem by Anthony A. Braga and Philip J. Cook (Oxford University Press 2023).

Preventing Youth Violence Before It Begins by Raymond B Flannery (American Mental Health Foundation, Inc. 2022).

Preventing Youth Violence in a Multicultural Society edited by Nancy G. Guerra and Emilie Phillips Smith (American Psychological Association 2005).

Strengths-Based Prevention: Reducing Violence and Other Public Health Problems by Victoria Banyard and Sherry Hamby (American Psychological Association 2021).

The Future of Youth Violence Prevention: A Mixtape for Practice, Policy, and Research Paperback edited by Paul Boxer and others (Rutgers University Press 2024).

The Routledge International Handbook of Violence Studies edited by Walter S. DeKeseredy, Callie Marie Rennison, and Amanda K. Hall-Sanchez (Routledge 2018).

The Scientific Evidence Supporting an Eight-Point Public Health-Oriented Action Plan to Prevent Gun Violence by Daniel J. Flannery and others, which is Chapter 10 of hapter 10 of Keeping Students Safe and Helping Them Thrive: A Collaborative Handbook on School Safety, Mental Health, and Wellness edited by David Osher and others (Praeger 2019) (see https://www.air.org/sites/default/files/2022-06/Flannery-Scientific-Evidence-Osher-book-Uvalde-blog-2022-rev.pdf).

Understanding Black Adolescent Male Violence: Its Remediation and Prevention by Amos N. Wilson (Afrikan World Infosystems 1992).

Violence: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Causes, Consequences, and Cures by Bandy X. Lee (Wiley-Blackwell 2019).

Violence in the Heights: The Torn Social Fabric of Inner City Neighborhoods by Eileen M. Ahlin (Routledge 2023).

Why Blacks Kill Blacks by Alvin Poussaint (https://archive.org/details/whyblackskillbla0000pous, 1972).

Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters by Peter Langman (St. Martin's Griffin 2010).

Youth Violence Prevention: The Pathway Back through Inclusion and Connection by John Van Dreal, Courtenay McCarthy, and Coleen Van Dreal (Rowman & Littlefield 2022).

Click here for a bibliography of Dr. Amos N. Wilson's work that deeply influences Wisdom Projects' programming.