Our Work

The Baltimore Wisdom Project (BWP) is the other name of Wisdom Projects, Inc., a 15-year-old, secular, nonpartisan, Black American-led 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. In our six peacemaking programs, we work with youth and families to prevent violence through grassroots community organizing. This work involves restorative justice-focused, trauma-informed, disability-aware community organizing, community education, and community healing. 

Everyday low-income Black and Brown people are often shut out of powerful systems (run by police, prosecutors, businesses, and politicians) to change the tide of gun violence and other forms of harm in their communities. We empower and train low-income predominately Black and Indigenous East Baltimoreans, young and old, to become trained peacemakers that carry out nonviolent campaigns (by word-of-mouth and through social media engagement). The campaigns help cultivate peace within their homes, neighborhoods, schools, and the streets.

Our work has greatly reduced incidents of multifaceted violence (including gun violence and domestic violence) against enrolled women, girls, men, boys, and LGBTQ+ community members, and cultivated a profound culture of nonviolence in the lives of enrollees.

Click here for data and video testimonials about our impact, milestones, and successes.

Often, only one strategy is deployed to prevent violence. Or one main population (like boys and men) are emphasized. Or mental health is privileged over physical health, or visa versa. Our six peacemaking programs are holistic because we integrate multiple evidence-based, data-driven values and practices in a daily, intergenerational, and gender-inclusive manner to prevent neighborhood violence. 

Research shows that immersive, on-the-ground, community-engaged field practices are most likely to prevent neighborhood and school violence. Gaining community members' trust, engaging with them equitably, and working around the clock 6-days-a-week helps community members share why and how violence occurs in their lives. We use this information to help community members build peacemaking campaigns, plans, mediations, trainings, and peer counseling. 

While building their peacemaking campaigns, community members receive intensive, integrated training in healing arts of restorative justice, trauma informed care, de-escalation through mindfulness, conflict resolution services, and Social and Emotional Learning. They disseminate their campaigns within their internal closed networks on social media or by word-of-mouth within their homes, schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, and the streets. Some of their video messaging appear in campaigns on our social media platforms. Most importantly, community members cultivate peace within themselves—within their mindsets, values, and conduct. Once strongly rooted, community members branch their peacemaking out to the people in their lives.

Our daily healthy food service for enrolled youth and families has played a major role in our violence prevention work.

We enroll interlocking family groups of diverse genders and ages, and help them cultivate peace and healing. Each year we serve approximately 215 low-income predominately Black and Indigenous youth and adults within interlocking families that live in 6 housing projects in the Jonestown neighborhood of East Baltimore.. (The Indigenous people are from the Lumbee Nation.) These housing projects are called Albemarle Square, Latrobe Homes, Douglass Homes, Pleasant View Gardens, Broadway Homes, and New Somerset Homes. Our enrollees constitute approximately 1⁄8 of the total population of an estimated 1,550 low-income predominately Black people in these housing projects. 

52 percent of the people that we serve are women and girls, 47 percent are men and boys, and the remainder are nonbinary individuals. Over 90 percent of the youth and families that we serve report being trauma-impacted survivors and/or victims of violence or individuals who have lost a beloved person to violence. A majority of our adult enrollees have experienced addiction and recovery (approximately 68 percent). Over 90 percent of adults and youth also have endured incarceration, or been impacted by the criminal justice system, or their relatives have endured incarceration. 87 percent of all of our enrollees report being survivors of police harassment and/or police brutality. All of the people that we serve report being disabled with 75 percent of youth having 504 and IEP plans in school, and 94 percent of adults having combined mental and physical disabilities.

Previously, the Baltimore Wisdom Project worked in partnership with community centers like the former Penn North Kids Safe Zone/Harambee Center in the West Baltimore neighborhood of Sandtown-Winchester and the 29th Street Community Center in the Greenmount East neighborhood of East Baltimore City. 

Currently, we are the official Educational and Health Services Partner of the over 200-plus-year-old McKim Center in East Baltimore City. The McKim Center was a site on the Underground Railroad that harbored and rescued enslaved Black Americans in the 19th century. 

Guided by a longterm memorandum-of-understanding, we work 6-days-a-week in partnership with McKim to execute our programming. At McKim, we prevent violence and cultivate a science-centered and equality-centered culture of healing and justice for youth, their parents, and their extended families. We also offer deep institutional support to elevate the McKim Center's operations, communications, programming, and fundraising. 

Our work is 100 percent free/no-cost. We accept no fees or gifts from community members and our institutional partner, the McKim Center. To support our work, we fundraise, offer consultations and trainings to organizations, and provide communications/editorial/media services. Please donate to uplift the people we serve.

Our community organizing empowers youth and families to become neighborhood peacemakers that embrace healing arts grounded in STEM. 

For youth, we integrate these healing arts into daily out-of-school-time lessons emphasizing STEM (life sciences, environmental justice, math, and engineering); justice studies; cultural studies; and civic studies. Nature and wilderness studies are a vital part of our scientific curricula. 

For adults, we ground our peer counseling and training in well-evidenced life science and social science, linking peacemaking to insightful knowledge about biological and environmental systems. We offer assistance with administrative forms, limited transportation services, limited help with emergency expenses, and other wrap-around services to aide community members as they contend with economic insecurities as well as interpersonal and systemic problems that impede peace, health, and wellness. 

Youth and adults use the work of healing arts and STEM to build their peacemaking campaigns within their networks on social media or by word-of-mouth.

Click here to learn more about our approach to STEM education.

Click here to learn about our Planet Protectors Laboratory, our youth sub-program for Environmental Justice and urban ecology.