Why are we called Wisdom Projects?

Why are we called Wisdom Projects?

We are called Wisdom Projects because our initiative teaches wise decision-making for peace, justice, and wellness.

For us, wisdom is when knowledge and practice become one, and thoughts and actions converge to foster healthy, careful judgement.

We believe that the best outcomes arise when we cultivate and practice this vision of wisdom.

Our work exemplifies the best of what is possible when a community most effected by the challenges of violence and poverty comes together on our own to foster our advancement rather than only relying on others in the city's carceral systems. 

Our work also exemplifies the best of what is possible when a community comes together to cultivate nonviolent advocacy and policy change for ourselves in ways that center base building (increasing the number of people within our community who work for change) and healing (fostering trauma informed care and wellness for inner and environmental peace).

This web-page tells the story of how we created our current initiative centered on wise decision-making.

In 2018, supported in part by seed funds from the Baltimore Development Corporation, a group of former and practicing nurses, social workers, ealth navigators, activists, and organizers led by Wisdom Projects' Executive Director, began to conduct data-driven field research in the low-income housing projects of East Baltimore City. 

All of the people with whom we connected and partner have (or their families have) been impacted by the criminal justice system (surveillance, arrest, or imprisonment; exposure to juvenile or adult jails, prisons; or harsh court action and policing), including our Executive Director. All of the people with whom we partner are survivors of multifaceted violence and trauma, including our Executive Director.

Our Executive Director had herself grown up partly in one of these housing projects and is a member of the community that we serve. She was mentored by James P. Zais at the Urban League who had authored and researched several books and papers about advancing wellness and preventing violence in public housing, including Elderly and Urban Housing and Modifying Section 8: Implications from Experiments with Housing Allowances, an early investigation of using stipends for residents to become trained Community Health Workers to work within their own neighborhoods to uplift conditions in subsidized housing. Since her work with Dr. Zais in the late 1980s and early 1990s, she longed to translate his and her other mentors' and kinfolk's perspectives and research into a specifically place-based violence prevention community healing project for residents of the kind of low-income housing within which she partly grew up at the now demolished Flag House Courts in Baltimore and the former Claypoole Courts in Washington, D.C.

At the time, the housing projects in East Baltimore were some of the city's epicenters for multifaceted violence, poverty, and intense, harsh policing. At the same time, they incubated generations of the city's talent and leadership. For example, Muggsy Bogues, the award-winning NBA player and businessman, grew up in the Lafayette Court housing project. 

The five main housing projects on which Wisdom Projects' team focused in our preliminary field research were Pleasant View Gardens, Albemarle Square, Latrobe Homes, Douglass Homes, and Perkins Homes (the latter of which was gradually closing down).

Our team's data-gathering and fact-finding goal was to discover residents' gifts and challenges, including their perspectives and experiences of neighborhood violence prevention and poverty with the hope of creating a community healing project that wholly benefited them and helped them cultivate a lasting culture of peace and wellness. 

From 2018 and 2019, our team went door-to-door, conducting interviews during visits to over 1,500 homes. We held 2-5 conversations with families per day. During our preliminary home visits (which we still do quarterly today for each enrolled family), we brought homemade meals and other mutual aid. Caring for community members was and is central to our work.

After receiving their informed consent to participate, we gathered confidential data and facts about how their families' experienced and overcame violence, incarceration, policing, and harm.

Eventually, we were able to enroll over ⅛ of the people who lived in the five housing projects on which we focused (approximately 250 youth and adults annually) into our new neighborhood violence prevention project.

In 2019, The Housing Authority of Baltimore City (HABC), the nation’s fifth largest public housing authority, reported that it served approximately 19,660 households consisting of over 43,000 individuals through its Public Housing and Housing Choice Voucher programs. While HABC does not possess data per neighborhood or region for their public housing in Baltimore (they only present citywide data), we estimate (from our ground field research) that there are approximately 14,300 public housing units in East Baltimore. These numbers are volatile because residential development in the city is often heightened and sometimes chaotic with several housing projects closing, revamping, or changing ownership over the last thirty years.

During our initial fieldwork, our team discovered the perspectives and experiences of community members. 

Four emerging perspectives dominated their conversations with us.

• Community members did not want to be engaged in a manner that viewed them only as broken or violent, which, overwhelmingly, they were not. Instead, they wanted us to engage with them as partners in their uplift in ways that affirmed their talents and perseverance while still offering honest ways to curb violence in their lives. Many community members expressed distrust of the institutions in their lives that "looked down" on them and they told us that they felt healthy and boosted emotionally when treated equitably, justly, and respectfully in initiatives that wholly benefited them instead of exploiting them.

• For them, gun violence was not a simple, one-sided problem of offenders versus victims. It was a problem that arose from multiple causes, challenges, and obstacles. Gun violence overlapped with other forms of violence. Community members told us that intimate partner and domestic violence, corporal punishment, major crimes, and hard-to-define and track forms of harm like bullying in schools were equally as problematic as gun violence. They told us that "roasting" among peers (complex forms of verbal putdowns and cults of performative aggression) as well as offenses arising from addiction to and selling of illicit drugs were significant experiences of violence too. Mental health issues like stress, anxiety, depression, and grief as well as other serious conditions like bipolar disorder were also part of their stories of neighborhood violence and poverty. They emphasized that these other forms of violence often triggered gun violence. Community members frequently talked of the need to "tell the whole story"--a story that was about more than just guns and homicides. They longed for methods that addressed multiple and overlapping problems.

• Community members expressed dismay that they were often not directly involved in efforts to combat problems of violence in their community. The city's then most prevalent solution involved harsh and often equally as violent policing. Harsh policing was one of the reasons why the city's police force was placed under a federal consent decree in 2017 following a Department of Justice investigation that found a pattern of unconstitutional policing practices. Community members longed for solutions to violence that are restorative (meaning, not involving harsh punishment and suffering) instead of retributive. They also longed to understand how to both prevent offenses and to intervene and work through conflicts within their families and between peers. They routinely observed that policing, incarcerating, and adjudicating through the courts almost always occurred after the fact of harm taking place.

• Community members spoke about systemic issues of poverty and environmental injustice that they claimed greatly influenced their experience of and exposure to violence. They told stories of how poverty (constantly worrying about how to pay high energy, phone, and water bills and afford basics like housing, food, healthcare, and expenses for education) kept them down emotionally. They spoke of how their communities were poisoned with lead and pollution, and how they lived in "food deserts" without affordable grocery stores within walking distance. They spoke of the ways that these overarching, longstanding civic problems often prompted aggression between residents who vied for meager resources while looking for ways to make money. They spoke of how poverty often prompted participation in major and minor crimes and offenses. Some spoke about family members turning to drug dealing, theft, or cleaning cars' windshields on the freeway because poverty was a severe problem that stretched over generations.

After gathering and listening to community members' perspectives during our initial fieldwork, we developed four sets of questions that correlated with the four overall perspectives that dominated our conversations with community members.

Question #1

Can (and how can) our project salute their achievements, talent, and potential while never pathologizing them?

Questions #2

Can (and how can) a combined array of holistic and integrative peacemaking heuristics address their need for training and practice that mitigates multiple and overlapping causes and experiences of violence?

Further still, can (and how can) a preventative and healing approach help community members stop violence before it happens; manage and mediate conflicts when they arise; troubleshoot and de-escalate crises; feel better emotionally, physically, and spiritually in ways that help them maintain peace; and address co-occurring and co-influencing factors like addiction as they cultivate peace broadly and deeply in their lives?

Question #3

How can community members themselves co-lead the initiative in a fully community participatory manner and, consequently, maintain a focus directly on their perspectives and needs? 

Question #4

How can systemic injustices of poverty as well as communal needs for belonging and inclusion be mitigated and addressed by training, positioning, and caring for community members as Community Health Workers for violence prevention? 

We then developed a longterm community healing project for peace, justice, and violence prevention that directly answered these four core questions from our initial fieldwork. Here are our answers.

We created and implement an initiative of asset-driven salutogenesis. 

Salutogenesis is a model for health prevention and intervention that emphasizes the factors and resources that promote health and well-being, rather than just ill health or disease.

Salutogenesis views people as assets and contrasts with pathogenesis, which views people in a pathologizing manner as broken, fundamentally flawed, or pathogenic.

In salutogenesis, we view community members as the best assets in their own uplift. With careful, culturally-sensitive, and culturally-responsive engagement and training, we help them become not just participants but leaders in their own advancement and good health as they cultivate peace and justice within every aspect of their lives. We give them choices and consciously center their voices, needs, and perspectives.

Over and over again, community members emphasize that feeling empowered is central to their healing and sense of peace, and our asset-driven model meets this central communal need.

See the following for resources for asset-driven community engagement:

The Handbook of Salutogenesis.

Salutogenesis in Early Childhood Where Peace Begins.

Salutogenesis and Coping: Ways to Overcome Stress and Conflicts.

Salutogenesis: Exploring Mental Health (Volumes 1 and 2).

We created and implement a holistic and integrative initiative.

Holistic means that we address multiple causes and experiences of body, mind, and spirit. ("Spirit" refers secular ethical and moral considerations). 

Integrated means that each of these areas overlap and commingle with other elements to form a whole that addresses problems of violence broadly, deeply, and specifically. 

Listening to community members, we developed 20 specific metrics. 

We aimed to pinpoint the full array of causes and experiences that often precipitated aggression and violence. 

We call these 20 areas metrics because they are areas by which we measure our impact. Each quarter of the fiscal year, we evaluate the percentage of community members that achieve milestones in eliminating the problems of each metric. 

The 20 metrics are as follows:

1. Ending homicides and suicides. 
2. Reducing evictions. 
3. Strengthening peace within the family youth between youth, parents, siblings, and extended relations. 
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.

Visit the impact page of our website to read our progress after approximately five years. 

Our holistic and integrative approach is also grounded in our clinical outcomes. Click here for more details about these outcomes.

We train community members (all of whom have endured violence or witnessed kinfolk who have endured violence) in the following holistic and integrative peacemaking heuristics that help them achieve milestones in each metric:

• Trauma-informed care to help them overcome their trauma in an embodied way, by deepening their sense of their feelings and senses and mitigating 7 common experiences of traumatic impact (often identified as "the Fs"): fight, freeze, flop, fawn, flee, finagle, and flashback.

• De-escalation to help them find calm, awareness, and focus through Community Participatory Mindfulness™ in the wake of challenges and crises.

• Conflict resolution and education through restorative justice to help them stop violence before it starts and mediate conflicts when they arise in a manner that eschews punishment and suffering.

• STEM, environmental justice, SEL, and arts learning to help them gain knowledge and practice to understand and address (in factual, logical, imaginative, and creative ways) how trauma and ill health impacts their feelings, senses, bodies, and environments.

• Peer Support to help them build a sense of interdependence to rely and advance each other collectively. 

• 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.

We created and implement a community participatory initiative.

Community members co-lead the endeavor with two serving on the board of directors of the organization for maximal input in the steering of the initiative.

Moreover, the community participatory nature of the initiative is reflected in its immersive family-oriented and intergenerational approach whereby youth and adults cross-train each other in peacemaking heuristics.

We created and implement an initiative of workforce development and mutual aid to mitigate systemic problems of poverty and injustice.

Workforce Development

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."

Mutual Aid

We also mitigate poverty, inequity, and injustice that influence violence through the following forms of mutual aid and wrap-around support:

• Healthy foodways: A daily homemade, low-salt, low-sugar homemade hot meal.
• Safe Passage Services.
• Caring Funds.
• Rescue Funds.

As the impact page of our website explains, our peacemaking initiative has had a high impact in the lives of enrolled community members.

Wisdom Projects' six programs have eliminated homicides and suicides among the population as well as drastically reduced rates of incarceration, police brutality, domestic and intimate partner violence, bullying, eviction, school suspension, expulsion, truancy, failing grades, crime, and gun possession. 

Our work greatly increases community members' environmentalist consciousness and their ability to advocate for social change at the intersection of poverty, the environment, and peacemaking. 

Community members peacemaking campaigns have addressed issues like flooding, high energy rates, power outages, pollution, and lead poisoning that directly impact their low-income communities. 

We enact criminal justice reform by providing neighborhood-level alternatives to and diversion from policing, prosecuting, judging, and incarcerating with deep practices of whole-community healing, restorative justice, organizing, and accountability.

We are cultivating a peaceful culture of wise decision-making.