Clinical Outcomes for Wisdom Projects' Programming

Wisdom Projects’ programming empowers violence-surviving, trauma-impacted, and low-income youth and adults in East Baltimore City to overcome their trauma and build peace within themselves, at home, in school, and on the streets. 

Our programming prevents violence specifically for community members challenged by post/pervasive-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and co-morbid conditions like depression, stress, anxiety, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Healing PTSD on a community level requires holistic, intergenerational treatment and Wisdom Projects innovates with gender-inclusive programming for both youth and their parents and families. 

Guiding youth and adults to regulate emotions and see the world in a fact-based, environmentally-conscious, and civic-aware manner is a platform for broad and deep mental health solutions that forge healing for PTSD in our programming. 

That is why our year-round programming (offered 6-days-a-week from Monday through Saturday) for youth and adults integrates peacemaking skills like de-escalation and conflict resolution with science, environmental justice, and literacy. 

Youth and families enrolled in Wisdom Projects’ programming realize the following evidence-based clinical outcomes:

As they process through the programming, enrollees 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). 

TIC is a system of embodied healing and coping strategies involving consciously affirmative nonviolent communication and expression that help avoid re-traumatization; address symptoms of PTSD, CPTSD, and co-morbid experiences like stress, anxiety, and depression; and uplift empowerment, safety, collaboration, and trusted relationships. 

Wisdom Projects’ implementation of TIC elevates best practices from SAMHSA as well as culturally-responsive approaches to treating trauma-impacted African Americans 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.

As they process through the programming, enrollees practice how to apply conflict resolution informed by restorative justice to 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 they process through the programming, enrollees practice how to apply de-escalation immersively in their lives for behavioral impulse control and perpetual nonviolent engagement. 

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.

As they process through the programming, enrollees cultivate a science-centered, creative, critical, and literate mindset that empowers community members to think and act logically, calmly, and imaginatively as they problem-solve challenges in their lives. A key part of this cultivation involves engaging within Social and Emotional Learning. 

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.