What We Do

The Baltimore Wisdom Project (BWP) is the Baltimore division and headquarters of Wisdom Projects, Inc., a 13-year-old, secular, nonpartisan 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. 

We build peace and uplift equality through community education and community healing for youth, adults, and families. 

Our work is 100 percent free/no-cost. We accept no fees or gifts from community members and institutional partners. We fundraise, consult, and offer communications, editorial, and media services to support our mission.

Our movement-organizing and community-building for peacemaking and justice has high impact. In the greater Baltimore area, there is a high prevalence of violence (hundreds of homicides and maimings each year; oftentimes several killings per week; scores of domestic violence cases each month; frequent school stabbings, shootings, fighting, and more). Yet, in our current project,  to date, no one enrolled in our programming has endured major violent incidents in their lives and no lives of enrollees have been lost due to violence. In our evaluations, community members report that the programming consistently improves their mental health, physical well-being, and capacities to form and sustain healthy relationships.

Click here to learn more  about our approach to peacemaking and holistic learning.

Most of the people with whom we work live in low-income housing communities or public housing and suffer from combined inequalities and injustices of poverty, housing insecurity, food insecurity, inadequate or inaccessible healthcare, and exposure to trauma and violence. 

We provide ongoing equality-centered and life science-centered, education and training in which youth and adults learn and practice peacemaking skills like de-escalation, conflict management, restorative justice, mindfulness, and trauma informed care. This education and healing empowers enrolled community members to become neighborhood peace advocates, ambassadors, and leaders. All enrollees receive daily, weekly, and monthly peer counseling in support groups; workshops in peacemaking methods; mediations; and wrap-around compensation if they reach benchmarks of violence prevention.

We center the family. Instead of recruiting and enrolling individual youth and adults, we recruit and enroll family units—youth and their parents or legal guardians as well as siblings and grandparents. This feature of our violence prevention and equality work makes it stand out in the Middle Atlantic region. 

When we say that our approach is "holistic," we mean that whole-community violence prevention must root in homes and families and be inclusive of multiple genders and generations. Strong ethics for peacemaking in the family and the home then branch out into the neighborhood, schools, and streets led by family members who are well-trained in peacemaking. 

Centering peacemaking in the family and the community helps us mediate complex cases of harm. There is no such thing as the "perfect" victim, survivor, or "offender." Offenses are rarely only two-sided. Violence occurs in relationships where parties may have relationships or even care for one another. We practice sophisticated holistic approaches to peacemaking and justice that rethink civic, court-centered, and policing-centered models for justice.

Our peacemaking champions equality and scientific intelligence. We view equity as inextricably linked to peace, wellness, and happiness for all people and not just a few. When enrollees learn life science about the healthy function of their organ systems, about environmental health and justice, about nutrition, and about the well-being of nonhuman species, then they gain fact-based knowledge that gives them the evidence to uplift their own lives. 

Our work is full-time and daily—6 days-a-week—Monday through Saturday —as we embed ourselves in the communities that we serve. 

We conduct ourselves with maximal cultural sensitivity and cultural responsiveness. 

Our staff live in the city close to the communities that we serve and we make our "offices" in the field.

Our Longterm Project

Currently, we work 6-days-a-week in partnership with the over 200-plus-year-old McKim Center in East Baltimore City in an out-of-school-time program augmented by weekly support groups, peer counseling, community counseling, mediations, and trainings. 

At McKim, we prevent violence and cultivate a science-centered and equality-centered culture of healing and justice. We also offer deep institutional support to elevate the McKim Center's operations, programming, and fundraising.

At the outset of our McKim Center Project, after extensive community participatory research (involving home visits, community counseling, case management, and intake sessions where we discovered and assessed youth and families' needs, values, histories, identities, customs, and practices in culturally sensitive ways), we were able to enroll approximately 1⁄8 of the total population of 1,549 low-income predominately Black households in the four housing projects surrounding the McKim Center (Albemarle Square, Latrobe Homes, Douglass Homes, and Pleasant View Gardens). We also reach extended families and additional youth and families who live in other parts of Baltimore City and Baltimore County. 

Consequently, our McKim Center Project serves approximately 300 youth and families year-round. We learned that approximately 52 percent of the people that we serve are women and girls, and the remainder are men, boys, and nonbinary individuals. Over 90 percent of the youth and families that we serve report being trauma-impacted survivors and/or victims of violence. A majority of our adult enrollees have experienced addiction and recovery.

Designed by Upāsikā Miss tree turtle, the Director (CEO) of the Baltimore Wisdom Project, our out-of-school-time after-school curricula empowers youth and families to become neighborhood peace advocates, ambassadors, and leaders. We do this by creating spaces and places where youth, families, and organizations may embrace healing arts like trauma-sensitivity, disability-awareness, restorative justice practices, conflict management, de-escalation, mindfulness, and social and emotional learning. 

For youth, we integrate these healing arts into daily out-of-school-time lessons (as well as school-time consultations) 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 also ground all peer counseling, training, and support groups in life science, linking peacemaking and wellness to biological, botanical, and environmental knowledge. 

For youth and adults, we offer assistance with administrative forms, transportation services, limited help with emergency expenses, and other wrap-around services to aide community members as they contend with both interpersonal and systemic problems that impede peace, health, and wellness. We call these services the "Inner Ground Railroad."

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. 

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