Our Programs and Services
The McKim Center Project
STEM, Athletics, and Healing Arts is a free, no-cost, year-round community education, health, and safety project for the 200-year-old McKim Center in East Baltimore City. The center is the oldest continuously active community center in the Baltimore City area and (to our knowledge) the United States.
Our overall goal is facilitate community members' self-empowerment as they choose, sustain, and enhance life and peace at the intersection of science, contemplation, and compassion. The project successfully completed its pilot stage and is now launched and seeking ongoing, robust support.
Since the 1970s, the McKim Center has historically served low-income Black, immigrant, indigenous, and people-of-color with roots in the East Baltimore area. However, our programming is open to all people associated with the McKim Center and we elevate our non-discrimination policy at all times. Likewise, while the population we serve at the McKim Center predominately includes girls, mothers, grandmothers, "aunties," nieces, and female relatives, we also serve boys, fathers, uncles, nephews, male relatives, nonbinary persons, and people of diverse genders. Insofar as anti-violence education often focuses on boys and men, our program’s predominate focus on girls and women is vital within the region as we examine the role that girls and women play in advancing peace and sustaining life for themselves, for their communities at-large, and for boys and men.
This project operates through the following lenses:
The project includes extensive concierge peace-centered educational services; health navigation; an after school program; a summer school program; community counseling for parents, caregivers, and youth; and institutional support for McKim staff, youth, and families. Our project emphasizes "STEM, Athletics, and Healing Arts." We integrate life science; health science; exercise science; environmental justice; urban ecology; healing arts; physical education; math; and cultural enrichment. Healing arts include social and emotional learning (SEL), cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness, restorative justice, and restorative practices. Cultural enrichment includes civic, justice, and social studies as well as several monthly workshops in dance and music of the African Diaspora. We offer services to the McKim community in-person, online, and in hybrid engagement that combines face-to-face with online learning. We view the McKim youth and families as the best assets in their own advancement. Our work with the McKim community represents our immersive SEL approach.
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. We guide youth in scientific methods (observation, argumentation, experimentation, investigation, and confirmation) using microscopes and naturalist drawing techniques. Our indoor growing guides youth to cultivate herbs, mushrooms, tomatoes, peppers, and other healthy edible life 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 nonviolent communication, conflict transformation, de-escalation, anger management, counter-messaging, code-switching, harm reduction, and impulse control. 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 collaborates with 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; and the University of Maryland's EFNEP Program.
JourneyMAKERS
In partnership with Christina Marsh, a Healing Arts Fellow of the Baltimore Wisdom Project and a full-time arts teacher at Towson High School in Baltimore County, Maryland, “Journeymakers” is a project-based SEL mentoring and restorative justice initiative that empowers a select cohort of students at Towson High School to uplift them within the school's behavioral health system. Students become “JourneyMAKERS” as they create ongoing visual narratives with photography, text, collage, video, and multimedia that embody their ongoing character-building, team-playing, and SEL development. Students share their projects in showcases to the school via video, photography or multimedia so that they are seen, heard, and valued as vital members of the learning community.
Check out the JourneyMAKERS' Instagram account where the youth leaders are beginning to showcase their multimedia.
Meditations
We provide 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, and skill-sharing) to 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.
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.
STEM, Athletics, and Healing Arts is a free, no-cost, year-round community education, health, and safety project for the 200-year-old McKim Center in East Baltimore City. The center is the oldest continuously active community center in the Baltimore City area and (to our knowledge) the United States.
Our overall goal is facilitate community members' self-empowerment as they choose, sustain, and enhance life and peace at the intersection of science, contemplation, and compassion. The project successfully completed its pilot stage and is now launched and seeking ongoing, robust support.
Since the 1970s, the McKim Center has historically served low-income Black, immigrant, indigenous, and people-of-color with roots in the East Baltimore area. However, our programming is open to all people associated with the McKim Center and we elevate our non-discrimination policy at all times. Likewise, while the population we serve at the McKim Center predominately includes girls, mothers, grandmothers, "aunties," nieces, and female relatives, we also serve boys, fathers, uncles, nephews, male relatives, nonbinary persons, and people of diverse genders. Insofar as anti-violence education often focuses on boys and men, our program’s predominate focus on girls and women is vital within the region as we examine the role that girls and women play in advancing peace and sustaining life for themselves, for their communities at-large, and for boys and men.
This project operates through the following lenses:
- Nonviolence education;
- Environmental justice and health equity;
- Behavioral health and public health;
- Mindfulness, restorative justice, and restorative practices.
The project includes extensive concierge peace-centered educational services; health navigation; an after school program; a summer school program; community counseling for parents, caregivers, and youth; and institutional support for McKim staff, youth, and families. Our project emphasizes "STEM, Athletics, and Healing Arts." We integrate life science; health science; exercise science; environmental justice; urban ecology; healing arts; physical education; math; and cultural enrichment. Healing arts include social and emotional learning (SEL), cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness, restorative justice, and restorative practices. Cultural enrichment includes civic, justice, and social studies as well as several monthly workshops in dance and music of the African Diaspora. We offer services to the McKim community in-person, online, and in hybrid engagement that combines face-to-face with online learning. We view the McKim youth and families as the best assets in their own advancement. Our work with the McKim community represents our immersive SEL approach.
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. We guide youth in scientific methods (observation, argumentation, experimentation, investigation, and confirmation) using microscopes and naturalist drawing techniques. Our indoor growing guides youth to cultivate herbs, mushrooms, tomatoes, peppers, and other healthy edible life 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 nonviolent communication, conflict transformation, de-escalation, anger management, counter-messaging, code-switching, harm reduction, and impulse control. 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 collaborates with 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; and the University of Maryland's EFNEP Program.
JourneyMAKERS
In partnership with Christina Marsh, a Healing Arts Fellow of the Baltimore Wisdom Project and a full-time arts teacher at Towson High School in Baltimore County, Maryland, “Journeymakers” is a project-based SEL mentoring and restorative justice initiative that empowers a select cohort of students at Towson High School to uplift them within the school's behavioral health system. Students become “JourneyMAKERS” as they create ongoing visual narratives with photography, text, collage, video, and multimedia that embody their ongoing character-building, team-playing, and SEL development. Students share their projects in showcases to the school via video, photography or multimedia so that they are seen, heard, and valued as vital members of the learning community.
Check out the JourneyMAKERS' Instagram account where the youth leaders are beginning to showcase their multimedia.
Meditations
We provide 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, and skill-sharing) to 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.
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.