Our Community Programs and Services
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The McKim Center Project
At the McKim Center, we offer the following forms of educational community-building and movement-organizing for health, safety, wellness, and peace:
Our life sciences curriculum for after school and summer school guides youth to understand how the five major classifications of life on earth (monera, protista, fungi, plants, and animals) create and sustain life in the wake of environmental and cultural obstacles. Learning about how humans and other species live optimally becomes a touchstone for valuing peace, empathy, and community.
Within interactive lessons, we guide youth in scientific methods (observation, analysis, experimentation, and confirmation) using tools like medical models, microscopes, video, and naturalist drawing. Our indoor and outdoor growing experiences guide youth to cultivate herbs, mushrooms, tomatoes, peppers, and other healthy edible life at the learning site and/or within their homes. If it is safe to do so, we also offer outdoor wilderness exploration and growing projects in the natural world on field trips.
A centerpiece of our health studies education is peacemaking: this includes community participatory mindfulness, nonviolent communication, conflict transformation, de-escalation, anger management, upstander-modeling, counter-messaging, credible messaging, code-switching, harm reduction, and impulse control.
We integrate STEM and healing with visual arts activities and cultural studies.
Additionally, we interphase with the McKim Center's longstanding commitment to athletic education and enrichment.
We continually make connections between scientific knowledge-gathering and contemplative peacemaking to prevent relational aggression and disrupt patterns that lead to violence.
Our McKim project gratefully acknowledges the past or present collaborations of Dr. Sacoby Wilson's Community Engagement, Environmental Justice and Health (CEEJH) laboratory in the University of Maryland's School of Public Health; Friends School of Baltimore; Baltimore STRIDE; Woodberry Crossing; Catoctin Quaker Camp; Gunpowder Friends Meeting; and the University of Maryland's EFNEP Program. This project has also been enriched by trips to the Maryland Zoo and the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture.
Journeymakers
The Journeymakers are a group of predominately Black youth leaders between the ages of 14 and 18 in East Baltimore who work with the Baltimore Wisdom Project and the McKim Center to uplift peace education. Sometimes these youth work in inter-age projects with younger youth or cross-culturally in collaboration with other youth leaders in the Baltimore City area. All Journeymakers receive adolescent-oriented pre-career/pre-college mentoring, restorative justice advising, community participatory mindfulness, and social and emotional learning. The Journeymakers are divided into three subgroups. Sometimes individuals within the subgroups overlap. Most Journeymakers work at the McKim Center and receive small stipends for their employment from the Baltimore Wisdom Project.
Journeymakers Subgroups
The History of the Journeymakers Project
In 1988, the late, great Mr. Ernest Johnson, an after school teacher with the Greater Washington, DC Urban League, asked Miss tree turtle (now the CEO of the Baltimore Wisdom Project) if she would teach a few workshops on peace practice, restorative justice, and trauma to local high school students who were, as Mr. Johnson described them, "real troublemakers." Miss tree responded that sometimes our preventions and interventions begin with how we think and speak about the people that we serve. She suggested to Mr. Johnson that, instead of calling the youth "troublemakers" that they be called journeymakers in recognition of their progress and achievements through the challenges in their lives. On that day the Journeymakers™ project was born.
Since that year when Journeymakers began, the project has continued in various guises at different schools, community centers, and community colleges for over 30 years. The program's mission has always remained the same: to give marginalized youth who are often viewed as "broken," who endure bullying, who may face contact with the criminal justice system, or who face high rates of suspension, expulsion, and over-correction, opportunities for the following:
Most recently, in 2020 and 2021, the Journeymakers program was in residence at Towson High School in Baltimore County.
Meditations
We provide regular online, guided meditations for approximately 30 minutes each session. The purpose of the meditations is to offer care and solace to participants in challenging times and to help participants release anxiety and stress as they find calm and cultivate affirmation for themselves and others.
Conversational Healing
We provide free, no-cost community counseling by phone and online to address health and wellness issues that may arise in the home, at work, in school, or during crises. Our community counseling also offers constituents resources and tools to navigate life's obstacles in accessing health services, housing, and other systemic issues.
Wisdom Sharing
We provide wisdom sharing (professional development, training, consultation, skill-sharing, and supportive services) to youth, teachers, administrators, parents, students, and community advocates to uplift and inspire with ideals and strategies for holistic education. Currently, we are humbled to work with the Friends School of Baltimore.
Communications and Engagement
We provide extensive justice-centered social media engagement through Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Medium (the latter of which will debut soon). Much of this communications and engagement includes original reporting and research-based messaging that amplifies the topics relevant to the under-resourced communities and people that we serve.
"JEDI" Consultations
We offer consultations on "JEDI" principles—meaning, principles of Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion—to organizations, corporations and businesses to enhance workplace culture, hiring, and climate. Our "JEDI" consultations combine conflict transformation, mediation, morale enhancement, and conceptual redesigning. We are adept at liaising with any division of a workplace, from the executive leadership to all employees. We are sensitive to a company's culture and traditions while recommended highly considered and well-bought-in changes. We accentuate the positive while offering affirmative, hopeful, and caring solutions, strategies, and systems for the improvement of a business' commitment to "JEDI" principles.
Click here to learn more about our JEDI consultations.
Multimedia
We make multimedia and video by commission to teach elements of community counseling, cognitive behavioral therapy, restorative practices, restorative justice, mindfulness, peacemaking, and caretaking in communities. Click here, here, and here for examples of our multimedia and videographic engagement.
At the McKim Center, we offer the following forms of educational community-building and movement-organizing for health, safety, wellness, and peace:
- Trauma-informed healing services (peace-building; nonviolent credible messaging; upstander-modeling; transformative justice; conflict transformation; community counseling; mindfulness; restorative practices; restorative justice; and health navigation);
- STEM and healing arts education (life science; exercise science; health science; nutrition; environmental health; environmental justice; civic, social, and cultural studies); and
- Institutional support (food service (if applicable); infrastructural support (counsel and limited resources for interior improvements for learning spaces); consultations for fundraising and development; consultations for justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (or JEDI principles); professional development for trauma-informed care and national standards for safety and security; and strategic communications).
Our life sciences curriculum for after school and summer school guides youth to understand how the five major classifications of life on earth (monera, protista, fungi, plants, and animals) create and sustain life in the wake of environmental and cultural obstacles. Learning about how humans and other species live optimally becomes a touchstone for valuing peace, empathy, and community.
Within interactive lessons, we guide youth in scientific methods (observation, analysis, experimentation, and confirmation) using tools like medical models, microscopes, video, and naturalist drawing. Our indoor and outdoor growing experiences guide youth to cultivate herbs, mushrooms, tomatoes, peppers, and other healthy edible life at the learning site and/or within their homes. If it is safe to do so, we also offer outdoor wilderness exploration and growing projects in the natural world on field trips.
A centerpiece of our health studies education is peacemaking: this includes community participatory mindfulness, nonviolent communication, conflict transformation, de-escalation, anger management, upstander-modeling, counter-messaging, credible messaging, code-switching, harm reduction, and impulse control.
We integrate STEM and healing with visual arts activities and cultural studies.
Additionally, we interphase with the McKim Center's longstanding commitment to athletic education and enrichment.
We continually make connections between scientific knowledge-gathering and contemplative peacemaking to prevent relational aggression and disrupt patterns that lead to violence.
Our McKim project gratefully acknowledges the past or present collaborations of Dr. Sacoby Wilson's Community Engagement, Environmental Justice and Health (CEEJH) laboratory in the University of Maryland's School of Public Health; Friends School of Baltimore; Baltimore STRIDE; Woodberry Crossing; Catoctin Quaker Camp; Gunpowder Friends Meeting; and the University of Maryland's EFNEP Program. This project has also been enriched by trips to the Maryland Zoo and the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture.
Journeymakers
The Journeymakers are a group of predominately Black youth leaders between the ages of 14 and 18 in East Baltimore who work with the Baltimore Wisdom Project and the McKim Center to uplift peace education. Sometimes these youth work in inter-age projects with younger youth or cross-culturally in collaboration with other youth leaders in the Baltimore City area. All Journeymakers receive adolescent-oriented pre-career/pre-college mentoring, restorative justice advising, community participatory mindfulness, and social and emotional learning. The Journeymakers are divided into three subgroups. Sometimes individuals within the subgroups overlap. Most Journeymakers work at the McKim Center and receive small stipends for their employment from the Baltimore Wisdom Project.
Journeymakers Subgroups
- The McKimers (these mixed gender teens work, grow, play, and receive pre-career/college mentoring at the McKim Center);
- The Girls Wisdom Group: These teenage girls work independently in an expeditionary learning capacity by going on field trips and pre-college/pre-career excursions). For the 2021-2022 school year, portions of this subgroup's work is gratefully funded by Youth As Resources.
- Inclusive Youth-Animal Cross-Cultural Empathy Group: Teenage girls and nonbinary teens from the McKim Center bond and learn about animal empathy with girls from Oldfields School's historic Riding Program.
The History of the Journeymakers Project
In 1988, the late, great Mr. Ernest Johnson, an after school teacher with the Greater Washington, DC Urban League, asked Miss tree turtle (now the CEO of the Baltimore Wisdom Project) if she would teach a few workshops on peace practice, restorative justice, and trauma to local high school students who were, as Mr. Johnson described them, "real troublemakers." Miss tree responded that sometimes our preventions and interventions begin with how we think and speak about the people that we serve. She suggested to Mr. Johnson that, instead of calling the youth "troublemakers" that they be called journeymakers in recognition of their progress and achievements through the challenges in their lives. On that day the Journeymakers™ project was born.
Since that year when Journeymakers began, the project has continued in various guises at different schools, community centers, and community colleges for over 30 years. The program's mission has always remained the same: to give marginalized youth who are often viewed as "broken," who endure bullying, who may face contact with the criminal justice system, or who face high rates of suspension, expulsion, and over-correction, opportunities for the following:
- Bond, heal, cultivate empathy;
- Make, see, and be enriched by art;
- Elevate peace practice;
- Advocate for justice;
- Make amends in the face of mistakes;
- Be valued as whole, productive people.
Most recently, in 2020 and 2021, the Journeymakers program was in residence at Towson High School in Baltimore County.
Meditations
We provide regular online, guided meditations for approximately 30 minutes each session. The purpose of the meditations is to offer care and solace to participants in challenging times and to help participants release anxiety and stress as they find calm and cultivate affirmation for themselves and others.
Conversational Healing
We provide free, no-cost community counseling by phone and online to address health and wellness issues that may arise in the home, at work, in school, or during crises. Our community counseling also offers constituents resources and tools to navigate life's obstacles in accessing health services, housing, and other systemic issues.
Wisdom Sharing
We provide wisdom sharing (professional development, training, consultation, skill-sharing, and supportive services) to youth, teachers, administrators, parents, students, and community advocates to uplift and inspire with ideals and strategies for holistic education. Currently, we are humbled to work with the Friends School of Baltimore.
Communications and Engagement
We provide extensive justice-centered social media engagement through Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Medium (the latter of which will debut soon). Much of this communications and engagement includes original reporting and research-based messaging that amplifies the topics relevant to the under-resourced communities and people that we serve.
"JEDI" Consultations
We offer consultations on "JEDI" principles—meaning, principles of Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion—to organizations, corporations and businesses to enhance workplace culture, hiring, and climate. Our "JEDI" consultations combine conflict transformation, mediation, morale enhancement, and conceptual redesigning. We are adept at liaising with any division of a workplace, from the executive leadership to all employees. We are sensitive to a company's culture and traditions while recommended highly considered and well-bought-in changes. We accentuate the positive while offering affirmative, hopeful, and caring solutions, strategies, and systems for the improvement of a business' commitment to "JEDI" principles.
Click here to learn more about our JEDI consultations.
Multimedia
We make multimedia and video by commission to teach elements of community counseling, cognitive behavioral therapy, restorative practices, restorative justice, mindfulness, peacemaking, and caretaking in communities. Click here, here, and here for examples of our multimedia and videographic engagement.